I Trained a Fly’s Brain to Generate WIRED Story Ideas

In a fascinating development, researchers from Google and various academic institutions have created a detailed map of the brain of a male fruit fly, known as a connectome. This map captures how 166,000 neurons and 125 million synapses fire in response to stimuli. The researchers have open-sourced this map, allowing for the simulation of how a fly would respond to various stimuli, essentially serving as a simplified form of artificial intelligence.

A project named PitchFly utilizes this connectome, turning popular WIRED story headlines into story ideas. By feeding the connectome hundreds of the most popular story headlines from the past year, it was trained to generate its own story ideas. The connectome was fed the most successful stories and instructed to create new ideas based on those patterns. This process involved converting headlines into words and phrases, which the neural network could understand.

While the fruit fly brain has no comprehension of the words or their meanings, it remixes the patterns it has seen in novel ways. This has sparked creativity, leading to ideas like "The Hidden Weather Problem Inside Surveillance," "The Engineers Who Think Elon Musk Needs Less Computer Security," and "Everyone Wants Cooking. Nobody Has Solved Donald Trump."

This concept has sparked various other projects, such as training the virtual fly brain to play VR games like Beat Saber and Minecraft, or even managing virtual car driving. These projects demonstrate the potential of using smaller brains, like the fruit fly's, to solve specific tasks. However, despite the humor and creativity, it's unlikely that this will replace human journalists anytime soon.