The artificial intelligence has taken over the technology industry and, as a result, is already beginning to be applied to various areas that are not necessarily related to it. One of its most recent applications is called Ghostwritera typewriter that houses a IA capable of co-creating a story together with a user through advice, guidance or suggestions.
As revealed by its inventor, the designer and artist. Arvind Sanjeevthrough his account on Twitter, Ghostwriter is a new step in the creative application of artificial intelligence. Sanjeev took an old typewriter Brother and removed its internal components in order to install modern hardware such as a Arduino which reads the user’s instructions and a Raspberry Pi which uses the language model GPT-3 from OpenAIthe same one that is present in the chatbot ChatGPT.
Ghostwriter wants to help authors to finish their works.
According to what he detailed Sanjeevone of the biggest technical challenges he faced in the development of the Ghostwriter Was the reading of typewriter keys. “I spent a lot of time decoding the keyboard matrix, which consists of eight scan lines and eight signal lines. I would press each key, read its activated signal-scan lines, and then assign them to the corresponding key.”said the creative.
To get a response from Ghostwriter in the middle of writing a text, just press the backspace key on the typewriter. Then, the response generated by the IA will be embodied on paper. Sanjeev even incorporated a pair of potentiometers and an OLED display to monitor the level of creativity of the system and the length of the response it provides.
The designer said he wanted people to feel comfortable using his creation, so he chose a typewriter, which he describes as “a trusted artifact from our past” of great popularity during the time when technology was more physical and more aware of people’s lives. “People trust typewriters because they know their sole purpose is to create stories on paper. Contrary to today’s technology, where you see black boxes trying to propagate unethical business models based on the attention economy.” explains Sanjeev.
Ghostwriter’s objective
The idea of Sanjeev with Ghostwriter is to allow users to consciously co-create stories with artificial intelligence at a more leisurely pace, which puts more emphasis on understanding the nuances of such a system. The act of “conversing” with the AI pressing a key and seeing its response via ink and paper is much more personal than interacting with a chatbot on a digital screen.
After sharing his invention, Sanjeev was met with an overwhelmingly positive response to Ghostwriterso he set out to feed the typewriter with all sorts of creative stimuli. However, it is still unclear whether the creative plans to put online the outlines of the IA to distribute your code for others to test.
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