Give an old typewriter a spirit of its own with GPT-3

There was an all-too-brief period in history when typewriters went from bulky, purely mechanical beasts to simplified portable electromechanical devices. But when the 80s came around and the PC revolution started, typing was on the wall for those machines, and by the 90s everyone had a PC, a printer, and Microsoft Word. And so little daisy typewriters began to populate thrift stores around the world.

We're fine with that, because it allowed [Arvind Sanjeev] to build 'Ghostwriter', an AI-powered automatic typewriter. The donor machine was a worn-out Brother electronic typewriter, which needed some TLC to restore it to working order. From there, [Arvind] worked out the keyboard matrix and programmed an Arduino to drive the typewriter, both reading and writing. A Raspberry Pi running the OpenAI Python API for GPT-3 communicates with the Arduino serially, which basically means you can enter a GPT write prompt with the keyboard and the machine spits out a dead version of the results. /p >

To mix things up a bit, [Arvind] added a pair of jugs to control creativity and response length, and an OLED display that only seems to deliver pretty animations, which we don't hate . We also don't hate the new paint job the typewriter got, but the jury is still out on the "poetry" it typed. Eye of the beholder, we guess.

Whatever you think of GPT's capabilities, it's still a neat build and a nice reuse of otherwise dead-end electronics. Need a little more help integrating natural language AI into your next project? Our own [Donald Papp] will bring you up to speed on this.

As promised, here is the full 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 that we see every day, I wanted to create a conscious intervention that (1/13) pic.twitter.com/ MCOeAcM26q

— Arvind Sanjeev (@ArvindSanjeev) December 14, 2022

[via That's Right]