This AI Uses a Fruit Fly’s Brain to Generate WIRED-Style Story Ideas

Meet PitchFly, a new “employee” of the latest editorial department of WIRED.

PitchFly has 165,112 neurons, all trained to generate story ideas. A sample of its early work includes “Hidden Weather Issues within Surveillance,” “Engineers Think Elon Musk Doesn’t Need Much Computer Security,” and my personal favorite: “Everyone Wants to Cook. No One Is Solving Donald Trump.”

How PitchFly Uses a Fruit Fly Connectome

PitchFly is based on a detailed map of the brain of a male fruit fly, Drosophila melanogaster. Developed by researchers at Google and numerous academic institutions, this map—known as a connectome—shows roughly 166,000 neurons and 125 million connected synapses firing in response to stimuli.

The connectome can be used to simulate how a fruit fly responds to different inputs. In essence, it is a simple form of artificial intelligence built by modeling real biological intelligence.

Because researchers open-sourced the connectome, it is relatively easy to import it into new projects with minimal prompting.

At PitchFly, we vibecoded a project in which a tiny digital fruit fly brain generates story ideas. I do not know why the flies wear little hats, but I like the style.

The project involved collecting hundreds of the site’s most popular article headlines from the past year and feeding them into the connectome. I asked Codex to handle the heavy lifting. It determined that the most efficient approach was to convert the headlines into words and phrases the neural network could process, then use the connectome to generate new ideas based on the strongest examples.

It Is Not Exactly a Fruit Fly Language Model

In other words, this is not a language model based on a fly. However, someone clearly created one.

The fly’s brain has no understanding of what words mean or whether they carry meaning. It is simply remixing familiar patterns into entertaining new combinations. A cynic might argue that this is exactly how some journalists write pitches, but that would be unfair. Judging by its stranger ideas, PitchFly is not going to replace me anytime soon.

• Small Changes in Agentic AI Rewrite the Rules of Eating and Drinking
• What Security News Is Secretly Doing to Donald Trump
• The Race to Reinvent Privacy Before Artificial Intelligence Breaks It
• Is China Trying to Make Digital Syndication Obsolete?

In the future, readers may be able to feed new WIRED headlines into the program so it can continue learning. For now, it is a promising proof of concept—and proof that the average WIRED writer is intellectually superior to a fruit fly.

Other Projects Built From the Fruit Fly Brain Map

Since the connectome was released in early September, dozens of other unusual and creative projects using the intelligence of Drosophila melanogaster have emerged.

For example, an X user named Lyra Bubbles demonstrated a project that trains the brain of a virtual fly to play the VR game Beat Saber.

Software engineer Alex Wormuth built StonkFly, which uses a fly’s tiny brain to make stock-trading decisions. Although the project is currently in the red, it is doing surprisingly well, all things considered.

At a time when many people are worried about the existential risks of artificial intelligence, “flies provide lighthearted and humorous relief,” Wormuth told me in a direct message. He also found it philosophically interesting to experiment with the fruit fly connectome.

“It raises questions about the ethics of this behavior and whether there is any consciousness in the replication of a fly’s brain,” he says.