2017年9月，我在一家小型在线广告创业公司工作，专注于通过深度学习预测Reddit帖子点赞数，进而优化广告效果。我们利用Reddit的1.7亿评论数据训练模型，不仅预测点赞，还能生成高赞标题，甚至尝试创造广告内容。这一过程充满趣味，也揭示了人工智能在广告领域的潜力。

🔍 我们的公司专注于帮助企业在Facebook和Twitter上获得更多点击。为了吸引投资，我们决定加入深度学习技术，预测Reddit帖子的点赞数，以此优化广告效果。

🚀 我们选择Reddit作为数据来源，因为其点赞和踩的机制简单，子版块能实现精准的人群定位，且拥有丰富的历史评论数据供训练。

🧠 我们训练的神经网络不仅能预测Reddit帖子的点赞数，还能反向操作，生成预计会获得高赞的标题。这一发现让我们在优化广告内容时找到了新方法。

😂 通过神经网络生成的标题颇具趣味，例如在政治板块生成‘Donald Trump不再是总统，所有跨性别者成为总统’的标题，在科技板块则是关于Elon Musk拯救网络中立性的内容。

👎 我们也能生成获得最多踩的标题，但这些标题往往涉及无聊或垃圾信息，如关于男性保健品的广告。

[Epistemic status: fiction]

Thanks for letting me put my story on your blog. Mainstream media is crap and no one would have believed me anyway.

This starts in September 2017. I was working for a small online ad startup. You know the ads on Facebook and Twitter? We tell companies how to get them the most clicks. This startup – I won’t tell you the name – was going to add deep learning, because investors will throw money at anything that uses the words “deep learning”. We train a network to predict how many upvotes something will get on Reddit. Then we ask it how many likes different ads would get. Then we use whatever ad would get the most likes. This guy (who is not me) explains it better. Why Reddit? Because the upvotes and downvotes are simpler than all the different Facebook reacts, plus the subreddits allow demographic targeting, plus there’s an archive of 1.7 billion Reddit comments you can download for training data. We trained a network to predict upvotes of Reddit posts based on their titles.

Any predictive network doubles as a generative network. If you teach a neural net to recognize dogs, you can run it in reverse to get dog pictures. If you train a network to predict Reddit upvotes, you can run it in reverse to generate titles it predicts will be highly upvoted. We tried this and it was pretty funny. I don’t remember the exact wording, but for /r/politics it was something like “Donald Trump is no longer the president. All transgender people are the president.” For r/technology it was about Elon Musk saving Net Neutrality. You can also generate titles that will get maximum downvotes, but this is boring: it will just say things that sound like spam about penis pills.