For years, putting words in Barack Obama‘s mouth has been a pastime of YouTubers and Tea Partiers alike. Now, with less than a year remaining in his second term as president, there’s an app for that.
Talk Obama to Me, an “official unofficial Obama video robot,” can synthesize any sentence from a collection of Obama’s public statements.
The site is overwhelmed by traffic at the time of this writing, but when it’s up, it’s full of comedic possibility. You can make the president recite classic @dril tweets, for example:
https://twitter.com/strutting/status/720670937771716608
Certainly impressive, even if it sometimes makes Obama sound like he’s singing Stairway to Heaven backward. (I tried that, too, but no dice.)
This seems like a Nice Thing, though, so it’s inevitable that the internet will not be allowed to Have It. You probably have about 10 seconds to do something funny with the Obamabot before assorted racists, birthers, and Trump-ites start using it to smear the president.
The server load is too high for Talk Obama to Me to process new words, but it will load videos it’s already processed: Seems people immediately tried “Trump 2016,” “Vote for Donald Trump,” “Build the wall,” “mexico will pay for it,” “Make America great again,” “Hillary is a bitch,” and “I am a n****r.”
It’s not only being used by Trump supporters, though: “Vote for Bernie Sanders,” “Vote for Hillary,” “Black Lives Matter,” and “Fuck Donald Trump” have also been tried. No need to make him wax philosophical about ribs and pussy, however—he already has.
The only thing holding together my fragile faith in humanity to leverage technology responsibly is that some noble hero put in “how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.”
Anyway, go forth and play with this app when it comes back up. And don’t be a dick about it.