AI-based Twitterbot Mimics Trump’s Fiery Speeches

Sometimes politicians’ speeches are so overly simplistic and void of logic that they could be easily mistaken for a speech bot gone wild. But in Donald Trump’s case that’s no longer a scenario. A MIT researcher has developed an AI-based bot that can post Twitter messages not easily discernible from the Republican presidential hopeful’s own tweets.

The bot was ironically dubbed DeepDrumpf after “Last Week Tonight” host John Oliver unveiled that the billionaire’s real family name is in fact Drumpf. Plus, the tiny piece of software can automatically enrich its database with Trump speeches and quotes to make posts even more realistic.

Trump is known for his simplistic and memorable comments, and mimicking him was not a challenging task because he often has the syntax of a fifth grader. Take for instance the following two comments and try to figure out who uttered them: Trump or Drumpf:

“We can’t even go there. We have nothing. And every time we give Iraq equipment, the first time a bullet goes off in the air, they leave it.”

and

“OK, it’s amazing right now with ISIS, I tell you what? I don’t want them to vote, the worst very social people. I love me.”

If you have a hard time in telling which comment has a human author we may have a problem. Despite its lack of consistency, the first quote belongs to the real Trump,  while the second line was cropped by DeepDrumpf.

The Twitterbot is the creation of Bradley Hayes, a computer scientist and artificial intelligence researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Hayes explaiend that he has equipped the bot with several deep learning techniques such as neural networks to self-improve as it gathers more data.

The researcher wrote in a blog post that Trump was the perfect candidate for the first series of Drumpfisms due to his simplistic language. Hayes described the real estate mogul and presidential candidate as the most “manageable candidate” for the experiment.

The Twitterbot can construct a Trump speech one letter at a time. For instance, if the tweet starts with the letter M, the post could contain the politician’s famous slogan: “Make America Great Again.” Next it crops another phrase until it hits the limit of 140 characters. It basically works similarly to text-bots in the nineties, except that DeepDrumpf can self-improve on the go.

The bot was also seen chatting with the real Trump on Twitter.
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