The training of Large Language Models and their subsequent use in AI chatbots require access to vast amounts of data, often scraped from various online sources, including news websites. This data is crucial for the bots to understand and generate human-like text. However, this practice of data scraping seems to have raised concerns among news websites. AI systems like ChatGPT can be seen as potential competitors in the news business. When chatbots are asked about current events, they can generate answers that rely on data from news websites....

For a long time I have been interested in thinking about what would happen if cameras could do more than capturing a somewhat realistic representation of the incoming light through a lens. I have experimented with long exposures, slit-scans and other ways of interpreting the world. But what if we could express a photographic vision in an algorithm we could use when capturing images? We already have the tools to retouch images in post production but I am interested in finding out what happens when I implement an idea in an algorithm before any light is captured and then apply it in an environment....

This is a prototype for a dining table pendant lamp. A camera monitors what’s underneath the lamp and tries to mimic the colors it sees with the LED:s on the top of the lamp. This creates a somewhat matching ambient light in the room. It is made from oak wood and it uses a Python script on a Raspberry PI Zero W for the image analysis. The drawback is that the boot time is close to 20 seconds....

The release of the OpenAI GPT-2 sample language model from the paper Language Models are Unsupervised Multitask Learners (also see Better Language Models and Their Implications) shows great promise of what is to come. The paper describes how training data was collected by following outbound links from Reddit. This got me thinking about what types of content it has seen. I have experimented with triggering recipe generation from the model by using “recipe” and similar conditioning texts....

Not that long ago almost all political advertising was clearly visible in the physical world. Posters, newspaper ads and pamphlets were widely circulated, collected and preserved. It is not unlikely that you are able to walk into an antiquarian book shop and find examples of political propaganda hundreds of years old. Other copies will end up in attics, basements, shoeboxes and occasionally be donated to archives or sold on eBay. It was easier to see who said what and to whom....

After the previous experiment with a character based recurrent neural network (RNN) for romantic novel titles I wanted to find more details about word level RNN:s. I was happy to find that Sung Kim has made it easy to explore word-level RNN:s with Tensorflow in this repository. Training text is 50/50 Christmas carols and death metal lyrics. Output examples below. (added line breaks and bolded lines that seemed like reasonable song names :-)....

The Stupid Hackathon is a one-day event where participants conceptualize and create projects that have no value whatsoever. Me and Memeleader made Chat Roulette Kastanjett - a service for all castanet players who want to talk to other castanet players over castanet morse code. We made a small chat website (with the help of socket.io and Heroku), wired up castanets with a micro Arduino controller running morse code debugging code. And we won a prize!...

Torch is a scientific computing framework with wide support for machine learning algorithms. Andrej Karpathy has an excellent blog post explaining recurrent neural networks (RNNs) and character level models. With his sample code for Torch it is very easy to get started creating your own RNN by using text from a specific domain. This model learns to predict the next character in a sequence. The model can be used to generate text character by character that looks similar to the original training data....

The Gothenburg University Library has digitized several years of sheet music from a publication called Musikaliskt Tidsfördrif (“Musical pastime”). The first issue from 1790 contains a short Polonaise. I transcribed it in MuseScore and generated an audio file. It may be the first time it is played for two hundred years or so. You can listen to it here: Download the sheet music and mp3 file below. Both are Public Domain....