{"id":7156,"date":"2026-09-16T23:09:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-16T23:09:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=7156"},"modified":"2026-09-16T23:09:47","modified_gmt":"2026-09-16T23:09:47","slug":"i-trained-a-fly-on-wired-story-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/silvybrand.com\/?p=7156","title":{"rendered":"I Trained a Fly\u2019s Brain to Generate WIRED Story Ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"


\n<\/p>\n

\n

Meet <\/span>PitchFly<\/a>, WIRED\u2019s latest editorial recruit.<\/p>\n

He has 165,112 neurons, and they\u2019re all trained to generate story ideas. A sampling of his early output: \u201cThe Hidden Weather Problem Inside Surveillance\u201d; \u201cThe Engineers Who Think Elon Musk Needs Less Computer Security\u201d; and my personal favorite, \u201cEveryone Wants Cooking. Nobody Has Solved Donald Trump.\u201d<\/p>\n

PitchFly uses a detailed map<\/a> of the brain of a male drosophila\u2014the common fruit fly. 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\u2014it\u2019s a very simple version of artificial intelligence based on charting real biological intelligence.<\/p>\n

Because the researchers open-sourced it,<\/a> you can easily use AI to import the connectome into a project with a little prompting. For PitchFly, I vibe coded a project in which the tiny digital drosophila brain generates story ideas. (I\u2019m 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. 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. The connectome was fed the best-performing stories and told to generate its own ideas based on that.<\/p>\n

In other words, this isn\u2019t a fly-based language model\u2014although someone apparently created one of those<\/a>. The fly brain has no idea what any of the words mean, or if any of it makes sense. It\u2019s just remixing the patterns it has seen in pleasing new ways. A cynic might suggest this is exactly how some journalists generate their own pitches, but I think that\u2019s a bit unfair\u2014and judging by its lunatic ideas, PitchFly won\u2019t be replacing me anytime soon:<\/p>\n