The AI That Writes One Character at a Time
Contents › Chapter 3 Pulling the lever
Temperature
A setting a person chooses: flatter slots or sharper slots
View in 3DTemperature: a setting for slot widths
"Temperature" is a setting that a person chooses. Lower the temperature, and the top slot gets even wider, so similar characters keep coming up. Raise it, and the slots become closer in width, so surprising characters come up more often. Watch the slots on the reel grow and shrink.
Next-character candidates: ‘⏎’ 100% · ‘␣’ 0.0% · ‘"’ 0.0%
Why?Low temperature gives safe but predictable text. High temperature gives fresh but odd text. The main text in this project was written at temperature 0.8. What the AI knows does not change. Only the way it picks changes.
Learn moreYou can also remove the thin slots completely. Keeping only the top few (top-k) means fewer odd characters. In "Try it yourself" you can change the temperature and the number of candidates.
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.