Chatbots like ChatGPT and Gemini have taken the world by storm over the previous few years. Many individuals now use them each day as a substitute for conventional engines like google, to help their creativity, and even simply to have somebody to speak to. The use circumstances are so diversified at current that nobody is actually positive which of them are going to emerge because the killer apps for this nascent expertise.
A pair of researchers on the Chemnitz College of Know-how in Germany just lately carried out a research ostensibly geared toward investigating how people work together with synthetic intelligence (AI). They needed to move their work off as being educational to please the college, in fact, in order that they went into the historical past of human-machine interactions, how individuals view AI, and what interactions with AI seem like. Blah, blah, blah, and so forth and so forth.
Investigating human-AI interactions?
However plainly what this group actually wished to do was hack away at their weekend pastime challenge at work. They hacked an outdated electrical typewriter to hook it as much as ChatGPT with the intention to work together with the chatbot through a teletype printer, you understand, as a result of science. This can be a challenge that will be simply as a lot at house on the pages of Hackster as it’s the educational journal it was printed in.
The challenge was constructed round an Erika S 3004 digital typewriter, an East German workplace workhorse first launched within the Nineteen Eighties. This machine was powered by a Z80 CPU clone and was geared up with 8 KB of RAM and 32 KB of EEPROM. Most significantly for the current work, it additionally featured a serial port. That port turned out to be the right entry level for connecting it to the twenty first century.
Connecting a typewriter to the twenty first century
To convey this getting older machine into the AI age, the researchers made use of an ESP32 microcontroller. With built-in Wi-Fi, a dual-core 240 MHz processor, and half a megabyte of RAM, it’s got what it takes to deal with the duty of brokering conversations between man and machine.
With solely six wires, the ESP32 was tied into the Erika’s extension port, dealing with each serial communication and energy supply. The typewriter spoke in an odd East German character set, so a customized substitution routine was wanted to translate between Unicode textual content from ChatGPT and the Erika’s restricted glyph library. When the consumer typed a immediate, it was printed to paper as common, however the characters had been additionally piped by way of the ESP32, wrapped right into a JSON request, and despatched off through HTTPS to whichever massive language mannequin was chosen.
Whether or not you see it as a tutorial experiment, a maker challenge, or a cultural commentary, there isn’t any denying the allure of watching ChatGPT replies clatter onto paper, one keystroke at a time, on a 40-year-old typewriter.This typewriter interacts with ChatGPT (📷: Okay. Koepferl et al.)
