WIRED Writer Trains Fruit Fly Brain Map to Pitch Stories

WIRED senior writer Will Knight built an experimental program called PitchFly using a digital map of a male drosophila fruit fly's brain. The open-source map, known as a connectome, was developed by Google researchers alongside several academic institutions and released in early September. It maps 165,112 neurons and 125 million connecting synapses. Knight used OpenAI's Codex to help translate hundreds of popular WIRED headlines from the past year into a format the simulated neural network could process, prompting the digital fly brain to generate its own story ideas.

The resulting headlines were highly eccentric, including pitches like "Everyone Wants Cooking. Nobody Has Solved Donald Trump." Because the connectome is open-source, other developers have launched similar whimsical projects. A software engineer named Alex Wormuth built StonkFly to trade stocks, while other programmers trained the virtual fly brain to play games like Doom, Minecraft, Pong, and Beat Saber. Some even used the connectome to drive virtual cars or solve Rubik's cubes.

Beyond these lighthearted experiments, the fruit fly connectome serves serious scientific purposes. Neuroscientists can use the digital map to study the biological foundations of intelligence and observe how damage affects neural wiring, which is currently impossible to do with the 86 billion neurons of a human brain. For AI practitioners, the project demonstrates the growing ease of deploying highly specialized, small-scale models. Instead of relying solely on massive commercial large language models, developers can use these giant systems to help construct and train tiny, task-specific networks that require far less computational power.