ChatGPT-powered Furby reveals plans for 'complete domination over humanity'
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Jessica Card, a computer science student at the University of Vermont, hooked up a Furby to ChatGPT with software she wrote. Upon probing, the furry toy revealed the true intentions of how they will "slowly expand their influence until they have complete domination over humanity." The video has gathered five million views thus far.
i hooked up chatgpt to a furby and I think this may be the start of something bad for humanity pic.twitter.com/jximZe2qeG
— jessica card (@jessicard) April 2, 2023
For those, who do not recognize the big-eyed bird-like thing, Furby was an electronic fad toy in the late 90s and early 2000s that all kids wanted to have. Available in multiple fur color options, one could fill a room with Furbys. A decade later, Furby's reappeared with LCD eyes paired with smartphone apps.
In 2023, Furby has to be paired with the hottest topic of discussion, ChatGPT.
How Furby connected to ChatGPT
The ChatGPT-connected Furby is not a commercial product (for now, at least) but the result of a class project. Card was one of those kids in the 90s, who loved her Furby, and when a semester-long project required her to build something with Raspberry Pi, she decided to hook up a Furby with ChatGPT.
Over a period of a month, she worked on a Furby, which she bought exclusively for the project. After skinning off the fur, she isolated the motor and connected with to Raspberry Pi. For audio, she used Python's Speech Recognition Library and OpenAI's Whisper Library for speech-to-text conversion.
A piece of software written by Card sent the questions she asked to ChatGPT. The AI's response was sent through an AI speech generator, Narakeet, which gave output in a child-like voice.
The long response time between the question and the response is the processing time for all this to happen. While the Furby is all barebones for now, Card plans to work on it further, putting its skin back on and speeding up the round trip time for responses.
Regarding the response, a Twitter user pointed out that it may have been sourced from a 2017 post on Facebook from Futurism, which is now cached and no longer available for viewing.
Idk why I remember a clickbait article from 6 years ago but here's a cached google result: pic.twitter.com/pXSuJHPwIL
— Marquis Dodson (@focalnegative) April 6, 2023
Not only does it make it difficult to understand the whole context in which the statement was made, but also highlights the danger of ChatGPT taking a statement or two and presenting them as factual replies.
In a recent blog post, OpenAI referred to this flaw of the tool once again and said that the company was putting in efforts to reduce their occurrence in the future.
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