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

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.