Confabulation time —
Poem/1 Kickstarter seeks $103Good sufficient for fun ChatGPT-fed clock which will hallucinate the time.
Prolong / A CAD render of the Poem/1 sitting on a bookshelf.
On Tuesday, product developer Matt Webb launched a Kickstarter funding mission for a whimsical e-paper clock called the “Poem/1” that tells the contemporary time the use of AI and rhyming poetry. It be powered by the ChatGPT API, and Webb says that generally ChatGPT will lie about the time or accept up words to accept the rhymes work.
“Hey so I made a clock. It tells the time with a label contemporary poem every minute, nonetheless by ChatGPT. It’s generally profound, and generally unfamiliar, and infrequently it fibs about what the right time is to accept a rhyme work,” Webb writes on his Kickstarter web page.
The $126 clock is the fabricated from Webb’s Acts Now now not Info, which he payments as “.” In spite of the web-associated carrier side of the clock, Webb says this may well now now not require a subscription to attempt.
Prolong / A labeled CAD rendering of the Poem/1 clock, representing its closing initiating configuration.
There are 1,440 minutes in a day, so Poem/1 desires to showcase 1,440 outlandish poems to work. The clock functions a monochrome e-paper display conceal and pulls its poetry rhymes by Wi-Fi from a central server hotfoot by Webb’s firm. To set up money, that server pulls poems from ChatGPT’s API and can share them out to many Poem/1 clocks proper now. This prevents costly API expenses that would add up in case your clock were querying OpenAI’s servers 1,440 times a day, right, forever. “I’m reserving a % of the retail label from every clock in a checking narrative to cover AI and server expenses for 5 years,” Webb writes.
For hackers, Webb says that it’s far doable so that you just can to replace the wait on-discontinuance server URL of the Poem/1 from the default to whatever you desire, so it may maybe showcase personalized textual mutter every minute of the day. Webb says he’ll memoir and submit the API when Poem/1 ships.
Hallucination time
Prolong / A photograph of a Poem/1 prototype with a hallucinated time, in step with Webb.
Given the Poem/1’s mountainous language model pedigree, or now now not it’s perhaps now now not surprising that Poem/1 would perhaps maybe generally accept up things (also called “hallucination” or “confabulation” in the AI area) to meet its activity. The LLM that powers ChatGPT is constantly buying for the perhaps subsequent discover in a chain, and generally factuality comes 2nd to fulfilling that mission.
Extra down on the Kickstarter web page, Webb offers a photograph of his prototype Poem/1 the set up the display conceal reads, “As the clock strikes eleven forty two, / I rhyme the time, as I constantly stop.” Good below, Webb warns, “Poem/1 fibs infrequently. I don’t factor in it turned into once in actuality 11.42 when this photo turned into once taken. The AI hallucinated the time in uncover to accept the poem work. What we stop for art work…”
In other clocks, the tendency to unreliably uncover the time would perhaps maybe very wisely be a deadly flaw. However judging by his humorous angle on the Kickstarter web page, Webb apparently sees the clock as extra of a fun art work mission than a precision timekeeping instrument. “Don’t rely on this clock in eventualities the set up timekeeping is essential,” Webb writes, “a lot like in the event you work in air web page web page visitors lend a hand a watch on or rocket launches or the make line of athletics competitions.”
Poem/1 also generally takes poetic license with vocabulary to uncover the time. For the length of a humorous moment in the Kickstarter promotional video, Webb seems at his clock prototype and reads the rhyme, “A clock that defies all rhyme and motive / 4: 30 PM, a temporal teason.” Then he says, “I needed to sight ‘teason’ up. It does now not mean anything, so or now now not it’s a made-up discover.”
