We Trained A Robot To Write Like Tom Friedman
To mark the 20th anniversary of Friedman's New York Times column, BuzzFeed has trained a robot to write like him.
On January 1, 1995 — twenty years ago, today — Thomas L. Friedman published his first "Foreign Affairs" column in the New York Times. Since then, the three-time Pulitzer Prize winner has penned more than 1,700 dispatches, think-pieces, and taxi-driver interviews.
All together, Friedman's mighty corpus contains approximately 1.4 million words — enough language to train a robot to sound like him. So we did. The Tom Friedman Sentence Generator above uses a statistical technique known as a Markov chaining to generate random (if only somewhat plausible) sentences.
Want more random Friedmanesque pontifications? Follow @mot_namdeirf, a new Twitter bot that uses the same technique:
His is a pure Internet store.
Fake Tom Friedman@mot_namdeirfFollow
His is a pure Internet store.
9:35 AM - 01 Jan 15ReplyRetweetFavorite
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Jeremy Singer-Vine is the data editor for the BuzzFeed News investigative unit and is based in New York.
Contact Jeremy Singer-Vine at jeremy.singer-vine@buzzfeed.com.
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