We Hijacked a Fruit Fly’s Brain and Made It Write VICE Headlines - VICE

Towards the end of last week, users on X started playing around with a simulation of an adult male fruit fly brain that had been mapped out by scientists using AI.

The vibe coders have been giving the online reproduction of the fruit fly’s neural network a range of tasks to perform, including trading crypto (it was rewarded with a dopamine hit every time it made a profitable decision), playing video games like Beat Saber, Doom and GTA, and learning how to parallel park on a driving simulator.

The results have been patchy, although one person successfully “turned the fly bisexual” by inhibiting the neurons it uses to detect female pheromones during “courtship.” 

I turned the fly bisexualInspired by Kallman et al ('15), I blocked mAL output in a 166,606-neuron fly model and measured responses in 8 candidate P1 male courtship neurons.In 3 experiments, when cued by other males, baseline P1 spikes rose from 0 to 1–5 after mAL blockade pic.twitter.com/FEiZBbcsmQ

I gave the fly brain $100 to trade bitcoin.Dopamine neurons are stimulated when the fly makes profit. Neuron activity controls buy/sell decisions and makes trades on coinbase.Will the fly get rich? pic.twitter.com/XVWSFattGu

the fly has completed* the ultimate test: parallel parking pic.twitter.com/KqdDg8dvo6

When the 166,000-neuron brain was originally mapped, it was hailed as a major and potentially life-saving breakthrough in neuroscience. We thought it would be fun to make it do something even more important, and forced it to come up with a series of VICE headlines.

First, we got in touch with our good friend Ed Daniels (who you may remember from such previous VICE articles as “We Got Him: The Troll Corrupting Soulseek With ‘Potentially Infinite’ AI Homer Simpson Songs Slams His Haters”).

Ed wired up the fly’s brain to a text generator, which allows it to come up with ideas for VICE articles. (We also tried to get the fly to write a soul-searching personal essay in response to being “turned bi,” but sadly with fewer than 200,000 functioning neurons, it lacks the brain power for even this most basic staple of the millennial media industrial complex.)

I’ll give it to you straight: at this moment in time, the fly is not very good at coming up with ideas. It would’ve been laughed out of every editorial meeting I’ve ever held, and then sacked. But it (he?) is learning every day. I like to think of him as our six-legged intern, and what’s great about that is he can’t take lunch breaks or turn up to work on a comedown.

We even gave the fly his own domain: FLICE.com. If you want to see what kinds of genius ideas for stories he has, input your starter word, and watch the fly set the agenda for the day’s discourse.

Follow Ed Daniels on Instagram @ed.daniels