Deep Learning-Powered Twitter Bot Launches “Presidential Bid” To Benefit Charity

It might be quite some time until an artificially intelligent agent can actually launch a real bid for the White House, but in the meantime we’ll have to settle for this. DeepDrumpf is a deep learning-powered AI vulgarian which uses a corpus of Donald Trump speeches to generate tweets that sound almost as incoherent and angry as the real thing.

Yesterday, the DeepDrumpf team announced DeepDrumpf2016.com, a website for the AI candidate listing his procedurally generated positions, an opportunity to bid for cabinet seats, and a donation link to the “campaign”. All proceeds go to supporting women in STEM.

Bradley Hayes, a postdoc at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL), explained how DeepDrumpf back in March. According to a post on CSAIL’s blog announcing DeepDrumpf, Hayes said “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.”

CSAIL’s communications manager Adam Conner-Simons went into a little more detail:

[If] the bot randomly begins its Tweet with the letter “M,” it is somewhat likely to be followed by an “A,” and then a “K,” and so on until the bot types out Trump’s campaign slogan, “Make America Great Again.” It then starts over for the next sentence and repeats the process until it reaches the 140-character limit.

Using this method, DeepDrumpf has come up with some real gems, and there are others that fall into the uncanny valley, at times sounding eerily like the real @RealDonaldTrump twitter persona.

As the real presidential race continues to careen off the rails, I decided it’d be fun to pull out some of my favorite DeepDrumpf tweets. And by favorite, I really mean some of the more horrifying ones.

On second thought, maybe an AI president isn’t such a good idea after all.