Homework Machine Hand Writes AI-Generated Assignments

Devadeth's homework machine generates text based on the user's own handwriting to result in more convincing penmanship.

I believe that laziness should be encouraged in many situations. Hardworking people will spend hours laboring on a project, but lazy people will find clever ways to achieve the same result with minimal effort. Laziness gave us tools, machines, computers, and ChatGPT. If you're a lazy student, then ChatGPT is a tempting solution for essay assignments. But most teachers don't share my enlightened principles, so they require that students write out their essays by hand in order to thwart ChatGPT submissions. To give those students a viable workaround, Devadath P R designed a homework machine that hand writes ChatGPT essays convincingly.

This is still a work in progress, but the project seeks to solve one of the biggest problems with other homework machines, such as this one that I covered a few months ago after it blew up on social media. The problem with most homework machines is that they're too perfect. Not only is their content output too well-written for most students, but they also have perfect grammar and punctuation — something even we professional writers fail to consistently achieve. Most importantly, the machine's "handwriting" is too consistent. Humans always include small variations in their writing, no matter how honed their penmanship.

Devadath is on a quest to fix the issue with perfect penmanship by making his machine mimic human handwriting. Even better, it will reflect the handwriting of its specific user so that AI-written submissions match those written by the student themselves.

Like other machines, this starts with asking ChatGPT to write an essay based on the assignment prompt. That generates a chunk of text, which would normally be stylized with a script-style font and then output as g-code for a pen plotter. But instead, Devadeth created custom software that records examples of the user's own handwriting. The software then uses that as a font, with small random variations, to create a document image that looks like it was actually handwritten.

It would be possible to feed that as g-code to a standard pen plotter, but such a machine can leave telltale signs as the pen moves while writing. To avoid that, Devadath designed a very rigid CoreXY CNC pen plotter that can reproduce the generated document perfectly. Moreover, it runs Klipper firmware to eliminate vibrations and other artifacts that might be visible in the writing.

Devadath plans to make this project open source so that students all around the world can express their natural laziness and skip the boring, meaningless essays.

Cameron Coward
Writer for Hackster News. Proud husband and dog dad. Maker and serial hobbyist.
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