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

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.

What happened

For PitchFly, I vibe coded a project in which the tiny digital drosophila brain generates story ideas. (I’m not sure why the fly has a little hat on, but I like its style. ) This involved scraping together hundreds of the most popular story headlines from the site from the past year and feeding them into the connectome. Skip to main contentSave this storySave this storyMeet PitchFly, WIRED’s latest editorial recruit. The connectome was fed the best-performing stories and told to generate its own ideas based on that.

A cynic might suggest this is exactly how some journalists generate their own pitches, but I think that’s a bit unfair—and judging by its lunatic ideas, PitchFly won’t be replacing me anytime soon:The Tiny Shift in Agentic AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Food and DrinkWhat Security News Is Quietly Doing to Donald TrumpThe Race to Reinvent Privacy Before Artificial Intelligence BreaksIs China About to Make Digital Syndication Obsolete? CommentsBack to topJoin the discussionCommentsBack to topYou Might Also LikeIn your inbox: WIRED's most ambitious, future-defining storiesAI slop backlash is actually having an impactBig Story: The cop who took on FlockThe rise of the 1am job interviewWatch: I stole a car by hacking this hidden deviceWill Knight is a senior writer for WIRED, covering artificial intelligence.

I used an open-source map of a fruit fly’s brain to vibe code a website called PitchFly. Its headline suggestions were delightfully bananas. Nobody Has Solved Donald Trump. ”PitchFly uses a detailed map of the brain of a male drosophila—the common fruit fly.

The wider picture

The fly brain has no idea what any of the words mean, or if any of it makes sense. In the future, perhaps I could have the program continue to learn by reading new WIRED headlines. For now, though, this seems like a decent proof of concept, not to mention evidence at last that the average WIRED writer is intellectually superior to a fruit fly. An X user called Lyra Bubbles, for instance, demo’d a project that involved training the virtual fly brain to play the VR game Beat Saber.

Alex Wormuth, a software engineer at Coinbase, created StonkFly, which uses the fly’s tiny brain to decide how to trade stocks. (It’s losing money, but it’s doing surprisingly well, all things considered. )“The fly brings lighthearted, humorous relief” at a time when everyone is worried about the existential risks of AI, Wormuth told me in a DM. “It sparks questions about ethics of this and whether there is any consciousness [in the replication of fly’s brain],” he says.

Others trained the connectome to play Doom, Minecraft, and Pong. Some fly brains apparently learned to solve Rubik’s cubes.

What has been reported

And someone also put the fly brain in charge of driving virtual cars—it turns out flies are terrible at parallel parking. (Then again, so am I, so I won’t pass judgment. )I haven’t verified that all these projects actually use the connectome—they may just be fun animations. Mapping different animal brains may help neuroscientists decipher the biological foundations of intelligence. It isn’t possible—yet—to map all 86 billion neurons in a human brain, but peering into the brains of smaller creatures can provide useful insights.

Sometimes even a tiny brain can do quite well. Joel KhaliliThe AI Researcher Who Just Quit Anthropic Says It’s ‘Crunch Time for Humanity’Jacob Coxon talks to WIRED about the “mini Manhattan project” inside Anthropic, the problem with alignment, and why AI labs have just a few years left to make their systems safe. 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.

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.

What happens next

Because the researchers open-sourced it, you can easily use AI to import the connectome into a project with a little prompting. I had Codex do the hard work, and it decided that the most efficient approach was to turn the headlines into words and phrases, then transform them into a representation that a neural network could understand. In other words, this isn’t a fly-based language model—although someone apparently created one of those. It’s just remixing the patterns it has seen in pleasing new ways.

After the connectome’s release in early September, dozens of other weird and wonderful projects powered by fruit-fly intelligence sprang up. He says he found playing with the fruit fly connectome philosophically fascinating, too. And some of them—like one that simply involves training the fly to take a well-earned break—seem like spoofs.