The problem with tweets, for many people, is that most of them are just mediocre. Well, there's a new Twitter bot, named DeepDrumpf, and it's promising to make tweeting great again - it's going to be so amazing and so great that people won't understand how they lived life without it so far, maybe.
Regardless how his comments make people feel, Republican presidential candidate Donald J. Trump spouts out headlines on a regular basis these days.
Whether he's claiming he could shoot someone and still get votes or threatening to raise a "great wall" at the United States' southern border, the sharp-tongued businessman draws press and ratings.
Now it seems a Twitter bot has kissed whatever blarney stone Trump once smooched. The bot, given Trump's ancestral family name of "Drumpf" - according to John Oliver - tweets out Trump-like lines thanks to an artificial intelligence algorithm.
@DeepDrumpf is the creation of Bradley Hayes, a postdoc at MIT's CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab). The bot uses a technique called deep learning to recognize patterns and create new content from what is has absorbed.
@DeepDrumpf has been fattened with transcripts from addresses, victory speeches and debate remarks from Trump. The stuff it tweets could give nightmares to Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, Trump's top two rivals on the campaign trail.
"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," says Hayes.
Hayes was inspired by a training model for developing deep learning via neural networks. The model that inspired him simulates Shakespeare. Hayes also found inspiration from a Boston Globe report that, after analyzing the language of 19 presidential hopefuls, concluded that Trump speaks at the fourth-grade level.
"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.
Check out some of very important things @DeepDrumpf has been tweeting about:
we really do have people that are stupid.
— DeepDrumpf (@DeepDrumpf) March 4, 2016
Great manufacturing, bring back our jobs, bring back our manufacturing, because my file, you know, I don’t need anybody’s money. ... — DeepDrumpf (@DeepDrumpf) March 4, 2016
[The second amendment] we have people that are crime. That's coming horribly; I looked. I say that is very illegal eminent domains... — DeepDrumpf (@DeepDrumpf) March 4, 2016
