PitchFly: WIRED's Fruit Fly Brain Experiment for Story Ideas

A simulated fruit fly is now proposing WIRED story ideas, with results that range from intriguing to gloriously incoherent. PitchFly is less a replacement for an editor than a compact demonstration of how an open brain map can be repurposed into a narrow creative tool.

WIRED reporter Will Knight built PitchFly from an open-source connectome, a map of the brain and nervous system of an adult male fruit fly. He supplied it with hundreds of popular WIRED headlines from the previous year, then had the system generate fresh ideas from those patterns.

A pattern engine, not a tiny reporter

Knight used Codex to turn headline words and phrases into representations a neural network could process, then fed them into the connectome. The system was given the best-performing stories and asked to produce new ideas based on them.

What the experiment can and cannot do

• It recombines patterns from the headlines it receives.
• It does not understand the words it processes or determine whether an idea makes sense.
• Knight therefore describes it as something other than a fly-based language model.

A research resource gets a new interface

The data behind PitchFly began as a major neuroscience project. HHMI Janelia Research Campus, Google Research, and scientific collaborators created what Google calls the first complete brain map for a male fruit fly. The map was released as open source in early September.

Google describes the map as a foundational neuroscience resource. Its intended scientific uses include visualizing neural circuitry, studying biological foundations of intelligence, and testing theories about how damage changes neuronal wiring. Google also says companion studies apply the map to visual systems, taste, and social behavior.

PitchFly does not establish that connectomes are a better route to useful AI than conventional models. But it makes one distinction unusually visible: a system can generate surprising combinations from familiar material without knowing what those combinations mean.