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

Vibe coders have gone viral after teaching the fly to trade crypto and “turning it bisexual.” We decided to make it our new intern.

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Towards the end of last week, users on X started playing around with a simulation of a fruit fly brain that had been mapped out by 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 and Doom, 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 neurones 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........

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