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 uses AI to chat with a person typing on the keyboard. The "ghost" inside the machine comes from OpenAI's GPT-3, a large language model that powers ChatGPT. The effect resembles a phantom conversing through the machine.
To create Ghostwriter, Sanjeev took apart an electric Brother AX-325 typewriter from the 1990s and reverse-engineered its keyboard signals, then fed them through an Arduino, a low-cost microcontroller that is popular with hobbyists. The Arduino then sends signals to a Raspberry Pi that acts as a network interface to OpenAI's GPT-3 API. When GPT-3 responds, Ghostwriter noisily types the AI model's output onto paper automatically.
GPT-3 is an AI large language model trained on millions of books and websites that statistically predicts which word is most likely to occur after being fed a prompt, which includes text typed by the user on Ghostwriter's keyboard. Depending on the input, GPT-3 can function like a chatbot or complete whatever text you feed it, including assisting with writing tasks or composing poetry.
