ai

311 Articles

Giving An Old Typewriter A Mind Of Its Own With GPT-3

January 15, 2023 by 27 Comments

There was an all-too-brief period in history where typewriters went from clunky, purely mechanical beasts to streamlined, portable electromechanical devices. But when the 80s came around and the PC revolution started, the typewriting was on the wall for these machines, and by the 90s everyone had a PC, a printer, and Microsoft Word. And thus the little daisy-wheel typewriters began to populate thrift shops all over the world.

That’s fine with us, because it gave [Arvind Sanjeev] a chance to build “Ghostwriter”, an AI-powered automatic typewriter. The donor machine was a clapped-out Brother electronic typewriter, which needed a bit of TLC to bring it back to working condition. From there, [Arvind] worked out the keyboard matrix and programmed an Arduino to drive the typewriter, both read and write. A Raspberry Pi running the OpenAI Python API for GPT-3 talks to the Arduino over serial, which basically means you can enter a GPT writing prompt with the keyboard and have the machine spit out a dead-tree version of the results.

To mix things up a bit, [Arvind] added a pair of pots to control the creativity and length of the response, plus an OLED screen which seems only to provide some cute animations, which we don’t hate. We also don’t hate the new paint job the typewriter got, but the jury is still out on the “poetry” that it typed up. Eye of the beholder, we suppose.

Whatever you think of GPT’s capabilities, this is still a neat build and a nice reuse of otherwise dead-end electronics. Need a bit more help building natural language AI into your next project? Our own [Donald Papp] will get you up to speed on that.

Continue reading “Giving An Old Typewriter A Mind Of Its Own With GPT-3” →

AI-Controlled Twitch V-Tuber Has More Followers Than You

January 12, 2023 by 45 Comments

Surely we have all at least heard of Twitch by now. For the as-yet uninitiated: imagine you had your own TV channel. What would you do on it? Although Twitch really got going as a place for gamers to stream the action, there are almost as many people jamming out on their guitars, or building guitars, or just talking about guitars. And that’s just the example that uses guitars — if you can think of it, someone is probably doing it live on Twitch, within the Terms of Service, of course.

Along with the legions of people showing their faces and singing their hearts out, you have people in partial disguise, and then you have v-tubers. That stands for virtual tubers, and it just means that the person is using an anime avatar to convey themselves.

Now that you’re all caught up, let’s digest the following item together: there’s a v-tuber on Twitch that’s controlled entirely by AI. Let me run that by you again: there’s a person called [Vedal] who operates a Twitch channel. Rather than stream themselves building Mad Max-style vehicles and fighting them in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or singing Joni Mitchell tunes, [Vedal] pulls the strings of an AI they created, which is represented by an animated character cleverly named Neuro-sama. Not only does Neuro-sama know how to play Minecraft and osu!, she speaks gamer and interacts regularly with chat in snarky, 21st century fashion. And that really is the key behind Twitch success — interacting with chat in a meaningful way.

Continue reading “AI-Controlled Twitch V-Tuber Has More Followers Than You” →

Can AI Replace Your DM?

January 8, 2023 by 18 Comments

The current hotness is anything to do with artificial intelligence, and along with some interesting experiments comes a lot of mindless hype. The question is, what can it do for us! [Jesse] provides a fun answer by asking ChatGPT to perform as a Dungeons and Dragons dungeon master.

There are many ways to approach a game of D&D, and while some take the whole thing very seriously indeed we prefer to treat it as a lightly inebriated band of intrepid heroes smacking each other and assorted monsters with imaginary swords and war hammers. Would the AI follow the nerdiest cliches to their pedantic conclusions, or would it sense that the point of a game is to have fun?

Continue reading “Can AI Replace Your DM?” →

Holographic Cellphones Coming Thanks To AI

January 2, 2023 by 21 Comments

Issac Asimov foresaw 3D virtual meetings but gave them the awkward name “tridimensional personification.” While you could almost do this now with VR headsets and 3D cameras, it would be awkward at best. It is easy to envision conference rooms full of computer equipment and scanners, but an MIT student has a method that may do away with all that by using machine learning to simplify hologram generation.

As usual, though, the popular press may be carried away a little bit. The key breakthrough here is that you can use TensorFlow to generate real-time holograms at a few frames per second using consumer-grade processing power found in a high-end phone from images with depth information, which is also available on some phones. There’s still the problem of displaying the hologram on the other side, which your phone can’t do. So any implication that you’ll download an app that enables holograms phone calls is hyperbole and images of this are in the realm of photoshop.

Continue reading “Holographic Cellphones Coming Thanks To AI” →

3D Modelling In English With AI

December 26, 2022 by 17 Comments

By now, you’ve surely seen the AI tools that can chat with you or draw pictures from prompts. OpenAI now has Point-E, which takes text or an image and produces a 3D model. You can find a few runnable demos online, but good luck having them not too busy to work.

We were not always impressed with the output. Asking for “3d printable starship Enterprise,” for example, produced a point cloud that looked like a pregnant Klingon battle cruiser. Like most of these tools, the trick is finding a good prompt. Simple things like “a chair” seemed to work somewhat better.

Continue reading “3D Modelling In English With AI” →

Hackaday Links Column Banner

Hackaday Links: December 11, 2022

December 11, 2022 by 13 Comments

“They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.” That might be stretching things a bit, especially when the “paradise” in question is in New Jersey, but there’s a move afoot to redevelop the site of the original “Big Bang Antenna” that has some people pretty upset. Known simply as “The Horn Antenna” since it was built by Bell Labs in 1959 atop a hill in Holmdel, New Jersey, the antenna was originally designed to study long-distance microwave communications. But in 1964, Bell Labs researchers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson accidentally discovered the microwave remnants of the Big Bang, the cosmic background radiation, using the antenna, earning it a place in scientific history. So far, the only action taken by the township committee has been to authorize a study to look into whether the site should be redeveloped. But the fact that the site is one of the highest points in Monmouth County with sweeping views of Manhattan has some people wondering what’s really on tap for the site. A petition to save the antenna currently has about 3,400 signatures, so you might want to check that out — after all, you don’t know what you’ve got ’til it’s gone.

Continue reading “Hackaday Links: December 11, 2022” →

A VM In An AI

December 10, 2022 by 41 Comments

AI knoweth everything, and as each new model breaks upon the world, it attracts a new crowd of experimenters. The new hotness is ChatGPT, and [Jonas Degrave] has turned his attention to it. By asking it to act as a Linux terminal, he discovered that he could gain access to a complete Linux virtual machine within the model’s synthetic imagination.

The AI’s first response was a prompt, so he of course first tried to list the files. Up came a list of directories, so the next step was to create a file and put some text in it. All of this resulted in a readable file, so there was some promise in this unexpected computing resource. But can it run code? Continue reading “A VM In An AI” →