There are two kinds of Americans: those who think Donald Trump says it like it is, and those who think that Donald Trump says it like a sputtering, sub-human gonad. No matter which camp you fall into, though, you might very well mistake the DeepDrumpf Twitter account for the real thing. Programmed by MIT's Bradley Hayes, DeepDrumpf leverages the power of neural networks to randomly generate tweets based on Trump's own bombastic, bloviating, bigoted speaking style!
A post-doc associate at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Hayes spends most of his days programming algorithms to make it safer and more productive for robots to work alongside humans. After catching lunch with some fellow CSAIL students about Donald Trump's statistically remedial way of expressing himself Hayes felt compelled to try feeding Trump's campaign speeches and tweets into a neural network to see if his style could be emulated by a computer.
"It didn't take that much work," admits Hayes, saying that he quickly started getting "crude" results that were "sort of like English, and very similar to political rhetoric." Just like Donald Trump's tweets! Deeming the resulting bot DeepDrumpf, a reference to both Donald Trump's ancestral surname and Google's DeepDream neural network platform, he plugged it into Twitter.
Here are just some of DeepDrumpf's tweets, which have a quality that is almost like what Donald Trump might smash out on a smartphone with his stubby, child-sized fingers after smoking some angel dust.
According to Hayes, neural network bots like DeepDrumpf can be used to simulate the structure and language of any presidential candidate. Trump's boorish communication makes him a natural fit for the project, even with a limited data set. "Of all the candidates, Trump uses the simplest, most repetitive language," Hayes says. "It really should take a lot more data to capture the complexity of a person who might become president."
What's next? Hayes says he hopes to start plugging other candidates' speeches into his Twitter bot, which is why he's already registered the DeepLearnBern Twitter account. The ultimate goal? "I'd love to get a tweet from Trump," Hayes admits. @RealDonaldTrump and @DeepDrumpf in a full-blown Twitter flame war! Just imagine the possibilities.