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The VICE Guide to Right Now

This Headline-Writing Machine Produces Clickbait Poetry

"Top Yoga Songs For Halloween," "Three-Week Abortion Day in Pictures," and more.
Photo via Flickr user oomlout

Read: This Guy Hates Clickbaity Headlines. Here's Why

Soon, if all goes according to plan, robots will take over all our menial tasks. We will be chauffeured around in self-driving cars, machines will cook our meals using various tubes of nutritional pastes, and, apparently, they will also relieve journalists of the chore of thinking up headlines for stories about dads who don't know how to use GoPro.

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At least, that's the conceit behind Click-o-Tron, a new website that's the brainchild of a programmer named Lars Eidnes. Eidnes figured since so much of what comes up in our Facebook feeds is formulaic nonsense, it's probably pretty easy to automate the headline-writing process.

He spells out the details about how the site works in a (fairly technical) blog post, but the gist is this: Eidnes built a recurrent neural network (don't worry yourself about what that is), threw 2 million Buzzfeed, Gawker, and Upworthy headlines into it, and then told the machine, basically, "Write some stuff that sounds like that."

The result is oddly poetic, with headlines that make you wish the articles attached to them weren't robot-composed gibberish. Choice examples include:

  • It's Not Just Me. So You're Doing Something Wrong.
  • Top Yoga Songs For Halloween
  • Mayor Ed Lee Does Not See Where He Is
  • Justin Bieber's Car Crashes After 18 Hours
  • Three-Week Abortion Day in Pictures

And the best one: Taylor Swift Says She'll Feel Good About Her Hair