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

Meet PitchFly, WIRED’s latest editorial recruit.

He has 165,112 neurons, and they’re all trained to generate story ideas. 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. Nobody Has Solved Donald Trump.”

PitchFly uses a detailed map of the brain of a male drosophila—the 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—it’s a very simple version of artificial intelligence based on charting real biological intelligence.

Because the researchers open-sourced it, 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’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. 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.

• 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 Breaks
• Is China About to Make Digital Syndication Obsolete?

After the connectome’s release in early September, dozens of other weird and wonderful projects powered by fruit-fly intelligence sprang up.