
@DeepDrumpf is cooking up tweets that look suspiciously like Trump's own words - here's how.
A new AI Twitterbot has actually found a way to out-Trump the Donald himself. According to a report from Discovery News, the bot, named @DeepDrumpf, has managed to harness the simplicity and strength of Trump’s words and crank out tweets that sound as if Trump typed them himself.
How was this possible, you may ask yourself? The bot was built by MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab postdoctoral student Bradley Hayes. Hayes expanded on an algorithm that enables computers to learn by picking out patterns and reorganizing information in a manner similar to the human brain.
The algorithm was fed words taken from actual transcripts of Trump’s debates and victory speeches in states where he won the primaries. The bot recognized patterns in Trump’s speech and recreates sentences that look startlingly like something the candidate would actually say.
The bot works so perfectly because Trump’s speech is rather simple. It’s been said that he speaks at a fifth grade level, using short sentence structure and few large words to convey his ideas.
A few examples of the algorithm fodder, taken from a speech Trump made as he announced his presidential bid in 2015:
“There’s been no crowd like this. And, I can tell, some of the candidates, they went in. They didn’t know the air-conditioner didn’t work. They sweated like dogs. They didn’t know the room was too big, because they didn’t have anybody there. How are they going to beat ISIS? I don’t think it’s gonna happen.”
“We can’t even go there. We have nothing. And every time we give Iraq equipment, the first time a bullet goes off in the air, they leave it.”
As you can tell, Trump’s sentence structure consists of short strings of words rapidly presented one after another. The Twitter bot takes this pattern and simply applies words drawn from Trump’s actual record to create bizarre, silly, and in most cases frightening tweets that sound almost like the real deal.
“OK, it’s amazing right now with ISIS, I tell you what? I don’t want them to vote, the worst very social people. I love me,” tweeted the bot. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense if you think about it, but then again, does anything Trump says make sense?
A press release from MIT describing the details of the project can be found here.
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