The AI That Writes One Character at a Time
Contents › Chapter 2 How it learned
At first, any character
Before learning, all the slots are about the same width
View in 3DThe AI before learning
So where do these percents come from? Behind this slot machine there is more than a lever. There are also about 63,000 dials. The lever spins the reel, and the dials set how wide each slot is. The board on the left shows 48 of them. Before learning, the dials are turned every which way, so the slots are almost the same width and any character can come up.
Text written by the AI: Once upon a timen.!qvttttep,,,,iSk????????????
Why?Each dial is really just one number. If its needle points right, the number is above 0. If it points left, the number is below 0. The AI before learning and the AI after learning look the same and do the same math. The only difference is how far each dial is turned. The box below shows text this AI wrote.
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.