I Taught a Fly’s Brain to Create WIRED Article Concepts

Introducing PitchFly, WIRED’s newest editorial addition.

With 165,112 neurons, it specializes in generating story concepts. Some of its early creations include: “The Hidden Weather Challenge Within Surveillance”; “The Engineers Who Believe Elon Musk Needs Enhanced Computer Security”; and my personal favorite, “Everybody Wants Cooking. No One Has Solved Donald Trump.”

PitchFly utilizes an intricate map of the male drosophila’s brain—the common fruit fly. Crafted by researchers from Google and various academic bodies, this map, known as a connectome, illustrates the activity of 166,000 neurons and 125 million connecting synapses when responding to stimuli. Essentially, it allows for simulating how a fly reacts to various factors—a basic form of artificial intelligence derived from tracking actual biological intelligence.

Thanks to the researchers making it open-source, integrating this connectome into a project with some guidance is straightforward. For PitchFly, I coded a project where the tiny digital drosophila brain produces story ideas. (The fly’s little hat is a mystery, but I appreciate the flair.) This process involved gathering hundreds of the most popular story headlines from the past year and inputting them into the connectome. I relied on Codex to handle the heavy lifting, and it determined the most effective strategy was to convert the headlines into words and phrases, then reshape them into a format comprehensible to a neural network. The connectome received the top-performing stories and was instructed to generate its own ideas from that data.

In other words, this isn’t a fly-based language model—though someone has apparently engineered one. The fly’s brain has no understanding of the words or their coherence. Its function is simply to remix patterns it has encountered in new, appealing ways. A skeptic might argue this resembles how some journalists create their own pitches, but I find that a bit harsh—and judging by its wild ideas, PitchFly isn’t set to take my place anytime soon:

• The Tiny Shift in Agentic AI Is Rewriting the Rules of Food and Drink
• What Security News Is Quietly Doing to Donald Trump
• The Race to Reinvent Privacy Before Artificial Intelligence Disrupts Everything
• Is China Preparing to Render Digital Syndication Irrelevant?

In the future, it may be possible for the program to continue learning by analyzing new WIRED headlines. For now, however, this serves as a solid proof of concept and, at long last, proof that the average WIRED writer possesses greater intellect than a fruit fly.

Since the release of the connectome in early September, a myriad of unique and intriguing projects powered by fruit-fly intelligence have emerged.

For instance, an X user known as Lyra Bubbles showcased a project where the virtual fly brain was trained to play the VR game Beat Saber. Alex Wormuth, a software engineer at Coinbase, developed StonkFly, utilizing the fly’s minuscule brain to make stock trading decisions. (It’s losing money, yet surprisingly performs well under the circumstances.)

“The fly offers a lighthearted, humorous respite” during a time when there are widespread concerns regarding the existential dangers of AI, Wormuth shared with me in a direct message. He finds explorations with the fruit fly connectome to be philosophically intriguing as well. “It raises questions about the ethics of this and whether there is any consciousness [in replicating the fly’s brain],” he expressed.