The AI housed in this machine works as a typing assistant and provides tips or suggestions to the user at the touch of a button.
Artificial intelligence has taken over the technology industry and, as a result, it is already beginning to be applied to various areas that are not necessarily related to it. One of its most recent applications is called Ghostwriter , a typewriter that hosts an AI capable of co-creating a story with a user through tips, guides or suggestions.
As its inventor, designer and artist Arvind Sanjeev , revealed via his Twitter account , Ghostwriter is a new step in the creative application of artificial intelligence. Sanjeev took an old Brother typewriter and removed its internal components to install modern hardware like an Arduino board that reads user instructions and a Raspberry Pi that uses OpenAI ‘s GPT-3 language model , the same one that is present in the chatbot ChatGPT .
Ghostwriter wants to help authors to finish their works
According to what Sanjeev detailed , one of the biggest technical challenges he faced in developing Ghostwriter was reading the 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-scanner 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 your typewriter. Next, the response generated by the AI will be captured on paper. Sanjeev even added a pair of knobs and an OLED display to control the level of creativity in the system and the length of the response it delivers.
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” that was hugely popular during the age of technology. 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,” he explains . Sanjeev .
I took apart my old typewriter and powered it using @OpenAI GPT-3.
Meet: Ghostwriter, an #AI creative writing companion that lets you co-write stories on paper with #ArtificialIntelligence 👻 + 🤖. pic.twitter.com/t8rP9AW51q
— Arvind Sanjeev (@ArvindSanjeev) December 1, 2022
Ghostwriter’s Goal
Sanjeev ‘s idea with Ghostwriter is to allow users to consciously co-create stories with AI at a slower pace, which places more emphasis on understanding the nuances of such a system. “Conversing” with the AI by pressing a key and seeing its response through ink and paper is much more personal than interacting with a chatbot on a digital screen.
Having shared his invention, Sanjeev was met with an overwhelmingly positive response to Ghostwriter , so he set out to feed the typewriter all kinds of creative stimuli. However, it is not yet clear if the creator plans to put the AI schematics online to distribute his code for others to test.
As promised, here is the full process thread for Ghostwriter – the #AI typewriter. A journey from idea to realization:
The idea: With the exponential growth and emergence of a prolific number of AI products we see every day, I wanted to create a mindful intervention that (1/13) pic.twitter.com/MCOeAcM26q
— Arvind Sanjeev (@ArvindSanjeev) December 14, 2022