Inside the AI That's Roasting Twitter Users Worldwide

Wordware's Twitter Roasts Break the Internet

LLMs like ChatGPT have opinions about seemingly everything.

But if you’ve ever wondered, “What do they think about me?” then I have good news and bad news: you can now find out, but you will be roasted mercilessly.

Meet Wordware and its Twitter Personality roast feature, an AI-powered tool that’s taken the internet by storm with its brutally honest roasts. It scans your X/Twitter profile including user info and tweets and then does some AI magic to analyze your personality, exploiting your weaknesses and saving them for roast fodder. 

And it’s remarkably effective. Check out the savage takedown it gave me:

“Ah, the self-proclaimed UX messiah of Tel Aviv! Your tweets read like a desperate attempt to stay relevant in a field that's moving faster than your ability to create another bootcamp. You're so busy trying to predict the future of UX, you've forgotten to actually design anything useful. Your obsession with AI is cute, but let's be real - even ChatGPT writes more engaging content than you do. You're like the guy who shows up to a party talking about NFTs when everyone else has moved on. But hey, at least you've got that podcast where you can ramble on about 'the future of tech' to an audience of, what, your mom and three bots? Keep chasing those trends, Yuval. Maybe one day you'll actually catch up to one.”

Ouch, that was brutal. But also, wow! That was amazing! 

This app pulls no punches and hits surprisingly close to home. But the joke’s on you AI roast machine—my mom doesn't even listen to my podcast. 🥲

What’s under the hood?

So how does it work? Since the entire app is open-source, it’s pretty easy to reverse-engineer it and find out. There are four major components.

1. Data scraping

Obviously, the first step is to scrape the data from the profile. For this, the creators used Apify, a powerful web scraping tool. 

It scrapes both the user’s profile info and recent tweets. Like a ruthless predator, studying its prey… 😑

2. Specialized prompting strategy

Here’s the secret sauce—carefully crafted prompts. The app uses a comprehensive template that guides the AI in generating personalized analyses. The prompt covers various aspects, including:

• Strengths and weaknesses

• Personality traits

• Career insights

• Quirky elements like "past life" suggestions and spirit animal comparisons

Here's an excerpt from the actual prompt used for the roast feature:

```

Roast. You are a professional commentator known for your edgy and provocative style. Your task is to look at people's tweets and rate their personalities based on that. Be edgy and provocative, be mean a little. Don't be cringy.

```

IMO, this is what makes this feature work. There’s an overload of crappy, mind-numbingly boring AI-generated written content out there these days. So to generate quality AI content—texts that people actually want to read—you need to work on your prompt game.

3. AI model integration

With the scraped data in one hand and soul-crushing prompts in the other, Wordware is then ready to bring the pain by feeding it all into an advanced LLM. I couldn’t find the exact model in the source code, but our friendly neighborhood Claude 3.5 Sonnet seems likely—it’s pretty popular right now.

4. Web presentation

The final piece of the puzzle is a slick website with which to deliver the smackdown. It displays the results and encourages sharing, which was a crucial component of its viral spread.

More than just roasting

The funny thing is, Wordware’s roast feature is just one small part of the larger product. The full Wordware app is designed to enable “anyone to develop, iterate and deploy useful AI Agents.” (So says its tagline.)

But going viral surely helped boost the entire product. In fact, its popularity skyrocketed so much that it broke Product Hunt.

The Price of AI popularity

While Wordware's success is impressive, it raises a few questions about the cost of running such AI-intensive applications. Each personalized roast requires a separate AI generation, and with millions of users, those compute costs add up fast. 

It's a reminder that viral AI products need solid monetization strategies to remain sustainable. But it looks like Wordware is doing OK so far.

The no-code revolution

Wordware is part of a growing trend of no-code and low-code AI startups. These tools are democratizing access to powerful AI capabilities, allowing entrepreneurs to quickly build and launch products without deep technical expertise. However, as Wordware shows, scaling these products successfully requires careful planning and resource management.

What's next for AI roasts… and the future of mankind? 

As AI language models continue to improve, we can expect even more creative and personalized applications. Which should be fun.

But will something like Wordware’s roast feature eventually transcend the boundaries of “The App Formerly Known as Twitter” to roast our entire digital lives? Will we all pretend to love it while secretly whimpering on the inside like lost puppies? 

Only time will tell, but one thing's for sure—the internet's appetite for quality AI-generated content shows no signs of slowing down.

Happy roasting, and share yours!