Rhyming AI-powered clock sometimes lies about the time, makes up words

On Tuesday, product developer Matt Webb launched a Kickstarter funding venture for a whimsical e-paper clock known as the “Poem/1” that tells the present time utilizing AI and rhyming poetry. It is powered by the ChatGPT API, and Webb says that typically ChatGPT will lie in regards to the time or make up phrases to make the rhymes work.

“Hey so I made a clock. It tells the time with a model new poem each minute, composed by ChatGPT. It’s typically profound, and typically bizarre, and infrequently it fibs about what the precise time is to make a rhyme work,” Webb writes on his Kickstarter web page.

The $126 clock is the product of Webb’s Acts Not Facts, which he payments as “a brand new studio for expertise and product invention by way of exploring and making.” Regardless of the net-connected service side of the clock, Webb says it is not going to require a subscription to operate.

There are 1,440 minutes in a day, so Poem/1 must show 1,440 distinctive poems to work. The clock contains a monochrome e-paper display screen and pulls its poetry rhymes by way of Wi-Fi from a central server run by Webb’s firm. To economize, that server pulls poems from ChatGPT’s API and can share them out to many Poem/1 clocks directly. This prevents expensive API charges that might add up in case your clock had been querying OpenAI’s servers 1,440 instances a day, continuous, eternally. “I’m reserving a % of the retail value from every clock in a checking account to cowl AI and server prices for five years,” Webb writes.

For hackers, Webb says that you’ll change the back-end server URL of the Poem/1 from the default to no matter you need, so it might show customized textual content each minute of the day. Webb says he’ll doc and publish the API when Poem/1 ships.

Hallucination time

Given the Poem/1’s large language model pedigree, it is maybe not stunning that Poem/1 might typically make up issues (additionally known as “hallucination” or “confabulation” within the AI area) to meet its process. The LLM that powers ChatGPT is at all times trying to find the most definitely subsequent phrase in a sequence, and typically factuality comes second to fulfilling that mission.

Additional down on the Kickstarter web page, Webb offers a photograph of his prototype Poem/1 the place the display screen reads, “Because the clock strikes eleven forty two, / I rhyme the time, as I at all times do.” Just under, Webb warns, “Poem/1 fibs sometimes. I don’t imagine it was truly 11.42 when this picture was taken. The AI hallucinated the time with a view to make the poem work. What we do for artwork…”

In different clocks, the tendency to unreliably inform the time may be a deadly flaw. However judging by his humorous angle on the Kickstarter web page, Webb apparently sees the clock as extra of a enjoyable artwork venture than a precision timekeeping instrument. “Don’t depend on this clock in conditions the place timekeeping is important,” Webb writes, “akin to when you work in air site visitors management or rocket launches or the end line of athletics competitions.”

Poem/1 additionally typically takes poetic license with vocabulary to inform the time. Throughout a humorous second within the Kickstarter promotional video, Webb seems to be at his clock prototype and reads the rhyme, “A clock that defies all rhyme and purpose / 4:30 PM, a temporal teason.” Then he says, “I needed to look ‘teason’ up. It does not imply something, so it is a made-up phrase.”