Meet Ghostwriter, a haunted AI-powered typewriter that talks to you

On Wednesday, a designer and engineer named Arvind Sanjeev revealed his process for creating Ghostwriter, a one-of-a-kind repurposed Brother typewriter that makes use of AI to talk with an individual typing on the keyboard. The “ghost” contained in the machine comes from OpenAI’s GPT-3, a big language mannequin that powers ChatGPT. The impact resembles a phantom conversing by means of the machine.

To create Ghostwriter, Sanjeev took aside an electrical Brother AX-325 typewriter from the Nineties and reverse-engineered its keyboard indicators, then fed them by means of an Arduino, a low-cost microcontroller that’s well-liked with hobbyists. The Arduino then sends indicators to a Raspberry Pi that acts as a community interface to OpenAI’s GPT-3 API.

When GPT-3 responds, Ghostwriter noisily varieties the AI mannequin’s output onto paper robotically.

GPT-3 is an AI giant language mannequin skilled on thousands and thousands of books and web sites that statistically predicts which phrase is almost certainly to happen after being fed a immediate, which incorporates textual content typed by the person on Ghostwriter’s keyboard. Relying on the enter, GPT-3 can perform like a chatbot or full no matter textual content you feed it, together with helping with writing duties or composing poetry.

Whereas experimenting with the machine, Sanjeev realized he wanted a strategy to management the artistic “temperature” and response size of GPT-3, so he added two knobs and an OLED standing display simply above the keyboard. Sanjeev additionally gave the machine a dramatic new grey, cream, and orange customized paint job.

Sanjeev first teased Ghostwriter on December 1, nevertheless it’s been months within the making. “The concept for Ghostwriter got here in early 2021, impressed by Rob Sloan’s Sci Fi author,” Sanjeev wrote on Twitter, “nevertheless it was tough to squeeze time from my full time function at @Lumen_world, so I’ve been slowly spending my weekends engaged on this.”

Half artwork undertaking, half artisanal hack, Sanjeev needs Ghostwriter to make an announcement in regards to the relationship between people and AI.

“I wished to create a aware intervention that lets you take a second to breathe and replicate on the brand new artistic relationship we’re forming with machines,” Sanjeev wrote. “The calm meditative interface of a classic typewriter takes away all of the digital distractions and takes us on an emotional journey by means of paper and ink.”

For extra info on how Sanjeev created Ghostwriter, try his full development thread on Twitter, which incorporates movies that element the development course of.