The AI That Writes One Character at a Time
Contents › Chapter 2 How it learned
Practice with thousands of quizzes
Repeat the dial-turning with many quizzes
View in 3DThe same thing, thousands of times
If it only fits one quiz, it just memorizes that answer. So we give quizzes from all over the stories, grade them, and turn the dials thousands of times. After only 100 rounds it already copies the spaces between words. With more practice, real words and sentences start to fall into place.
Text written by the AI: Once upon a time rige theWin stinoan cothe s h
Why?Each round, it takes quizzes from 64 bits of story, adds up the results, and turns the dials once. The fully trained AI did this 5,000 times. In the box below you can see the correct slot get wider with practice. Common words and endings are learned first.
View this scene in 3D →More in the series
A small AI (a character-level language model with 62,652 dials) was really trained on 40 fairy tales and fables retold for this project (about 376,021 characters), and every number here was calculated by that AI. It is a tiny model for learning; real chatbots are far bigger.