This article was published on March 4, 2016

MIT’s Twitter bot ‘Deep Drumpf’ uses AI to make Twitter great again


MIT’s Twitter bot ‘Deep Drumpf’ uses AI to make Twitter great again

If you think Donald Trump says crazy things, just wait until you get a glimpse of his Twitter bot likeness.

Dubbed ‘Deep Drumpf’ (after John Oliver’s recent dismantling of Trump), the project was a creation of MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) postdoc Bradley Hayes.

The bot relies on a field of artificial intelligence (AI) called ‘deep learning’ to learn Trump’s — or Drumpf’s — natural language patterns.

To do this, the AI devoured a few hours of Trump victory speech transcripts and through use of an existing training model that teaches computers to find patterns on their own, began to find the patterns in Trump’s speech in which it reproduces on the Twitter account.

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“Trump’s language tends to be more simplistic, so I figured that, as a modeling problem, he would be the most manageable candidate to study,” says 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.

Much like Trump himself, the bot doesn’t always make sense.  When correct, the tweets are indiscernible from an actual tweet from The Donald.

Deep Drumpf [Twitter]

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