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

https://media.wired.com/photos/6aa8849459082b83fd22fcf8/191:100/w_1280,c_limit/AI-Lab-This-Fly-Can-Come-Up-With-WIRED-Stories-Businesspsd.jpg

Meet PitchFly, WIRED’s latest editorial recruit.

He has 165,112 neurons, and they’re all trained to generate story ideas. A sampling of his early output: “The Hidden Weather Problem Inside Surveillance”; “The Engineers Who Think Elon Musk Needs Less Computer Security”; and my personal favorite, “Everyone Wants Cooking. Nobody Has Solved Donald Trump.”

PitchFly uses a detailed map of the brain of a male drosophila—the common fruit fly. Developed by researchers from Google and a number of academic institutions, the map, known as a connectome, captures the way that 166,000 neurons and 125 million connecting synapses fire in response to stimuli. In essence, you can use it to simulate how a fly would respond to lots of stuff—it’s a very simple version of artificial intelligence based on charting real biological intelligence.

Because the researchers open-sourced it,you can easily use AI to import the connectome into a project with a...

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