If you think Marco Rubio is the most robotic presidential candidate, think again.
A postdoc student at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab (CSAIL) developed a Donald Trump Twitterbot that Tweets out Trump-like statements. The bot is based on artificial intelligence (AI) that is trained on just a few hours of transcripts of Trump’s victory speeches and debate performances.
Dubbed @DeepDrumpf, after John Oliver’s recent segment (watch below) about Trump’s ancestral name, the bot creates Tweets one letter at a time. For example, 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.
The Tweetbot’s creator, CSAIL postdoc Bradley Hayes, used techniques from “deep-learning,” a field of artificial intelligence that uses systems called “neural networks” to teach computers to to find patterns on their own.
Hayes was inspired by an existing training model that can simulate Shakespeare, as well as a recent report that analyzed the presidential candidates’ linguistic patterns to find that Trump speaks at a fourth-grade level.
Here’s a look at some of the tweets from @DeepDrumpf:
“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.
@DeepDrumpf’s Tweets don’t always make complete sense, but are usually at least partially coherent – much like the candidate himself. “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.
The real Trump has yet to respond to his Twitter bot.
