The Trump AI Twitterbot is more Donald Trump than Donald Trump
What happens when you use one of the closest things we have to an AI -- a Recurrent Neural Network or RNN -- and feed it a steady diet of Trump's speeches and debate transcripts? You're about to find out.
The @DeepDrumpf Twitterbot, a project by Bradley Hayes, a postdoctoral researcher at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL), is based on an artificial intelligence algorithm that uses deep-learning techniques.
A similar RNN-based project is based on Shakespeare's works. But Trump's language, Hayes says, is "more simplistic."
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Turns out, that's quite an understatement, as the @DeepDrumpf often manages to spit out sentences remarkably close to actual Trump sentences.
Check out some of our favorites, below.
So how do the bot's answers sound so remarkably close to reality? According to Hayes, “the algorithm essentially learns an underlying structure from all the data it gets, and then comes up with different combinations of the data that reflect the structure that it was taught.” You can draw your own conclusions from that one.
DeepDrumpf can also interact with actual Trump. Check out this short exchange, and tell us this is isn't just perfect.
So where does the project go from here? Hayes has an idea of creating similar accounts for other presidential candidates, and have them all participate in an AI debate.
As for @DeepDrumpf itself, it might very well go on to become the President. Because, why not?
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Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
