For all you marketers who dream of automated Twitter bots to efficiently and convincingly tout your brands, perhaps there's hope yet. At least there's a potential proof of concept in @DeepDrumpf, an automated Twitter handle that The Guardian reports was created at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab:
Donald Trump may be a "really smart person" by his own estimation, but his speeches are now fuelling a really smart Twitter bot, which uses artificial-intelligence technology to copy the Republican frontrunner.
The name is a reference to the candidate's family name from long ago, as John Oliver recently pointed out, temporarily making "Donald Drumpf" a more popular Google search than either "Marco Rubio" or "Ted Cruz."
Some of @DeepDrumpf's pronouncements so far indeed sound more or less like Mr. Trump's own tweets. Here's the @RealDonaldTrump on a few important subjects:
I started my business with very little and built it into a great company, with some of the best real estate assets in the World. Amazing!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) February 27, 2016
Rubio puts out ad that my pilot was a drug dealer- not true, not my pilot! Guy owned helicopter company- don't think I ever even used.
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 4, 2016
And here's @DeepDrumpf:
I'm what ISIS doesn't need.
— DeepDrumpf (@DeepDrumpf) March 3, 2016
OK, it's amazing right now with ISIS, I tell you what? I don't want them to vote, the worst very social people. I love me.
— DeepDrumpf (@DeepDrumpf) March 3, 2016
The military, make it great again. And we're 26th in the world on President Obama's illegal executive order.
— DeepDrumpf (@DeepDrumpf) March 3, 2016
On second thought, if artificial intelligence is only coming this close to mimicking a candidate who is said to give speeches at a fourth-grade level, maybe marketers should plan on staffing their social media accounts with humans for a while yet.
