The AI That Writes One Character at a Time
Contents › Chapter 4 One character at a time
Add it, and again
Add the picked character, then guess again
View in 3DAdd it, then guess again
The picked character is added to the end of the text. Now the text is one character longer. The AI looks at the longer text and guesses the next character again. That is why the slots on the reel change every time a character is written.
Next-character candidates: ‘s’ 76% · ‘l’ 12% · ‘y’ 4.2%
Why?The AI does not plan the whole story ahead. It only ever thinks about "the one character that comes after the text so far". It is like playing a word-chain game all by yourself.
Learn moreFeeding each result back in to make the next one is called autoregression.
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.