An evil genius out on the world wide web has created a program that makes President Obama say whatever zany thing you can come up with.
The website, Talk Obama to Me, calls itself the "official unofficial Obama video robot." It scours through thousands of the president's video clips to make it seem like he is saying whatever people type.
You can make the president sing to you...
@jlabove @talkobamatome Oh! I just made him rap Gin & Juice, but I like where you went with it.
Or air your personal grievances...
And even espouse some, um, totally crazy theories.
The website's creator is Ed King, a Ph.D. candidate in linguistics at Stanford University. He told BuzzFeed News he first had the idea in 2008 after seeing a similar video.
He said the video featured former President George W. Bush edited to "sing" U2's "Sunday, Bloody Sunday."
"I was studying linguistics and computer science at the time and learning about things like automatic speech generation," he said. "So when I saw the 'Sunday Bloody Sunday' video I thought, 'hmm, I wonder if I could do that automatically.'"
He said he has been working on the project off and on since March 2015, but put in probably three months of "solid" work.
"It took about a month to put together the video database, then another month to get it to handle words that Obama had never said before," he said. "Then it was just a matter of putting the pieces together and getting it online."
The website just launched on Wednesday and has since garnered a lot of fans. King said the site already had 101,411 visitors, with 158,000 videos generated.
unbelievable first day with over eleven thousand(!) users. squashing some bugs tonight so hopefully we'll all have a smoother obam-morrow
In fact, it has become so popular that its server keeps crashing.
to anyone having server issues (502 Bad Gateway): try again after a few minutes! we're getting overloaded at times, but we always come back!
The response has been "absolutely incredible," King said.
"I had thought it might get some notice from people who are interested in tech or linguistics, but this is so far beyond what I could have hoped," he added.
The server issues have been the only downfall of the site's popularity, but King said he is working on resolving them.
The site, however, "always comes back" in a few minutes, he said.
Before we go, one final message from the president.
