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: