Jessica Card's Skeletal Furby Responds via ChatGPT, Reveals a Plan to Take Over the World
OpenAI's ChatGPT given life in a macabre experiment blending toy robots, large language models, speech recognition, and speech synthesis.
The University of Vermont's Jessica Card has given a classic Furby toy a high-tech makeover, connecting it to OpenAI's ChatGPT large language model (LLM) system and a text-to-speech engine to give it absolutely interactivity — and, apparently, a plan to take over the world.
"I hooked up ChatGPT to a Furby," Card explains of the project, which distressingly required the extraction of most of the Furby's electronic guts from its fluffy body in a modification definitely not approved by its original designers, "and I think this may be the start of something bad for humanity."
Card's project uses only the moving parts from inside the Furby, a robot toy first released in 1998 by Tiger Electronics as an interactive pet. It's possible to play with a Furby, "feed" it by pushing on its tongue, and even to anger one by pulling its tail or holding it upside down — but while models have included microphones and the ability to pepper English words and phrases into "Furbish" utterances, none of truly spoken back. Until now.
The modified Furby uses a combination of a speech synthesis engine, a speech recognition engine, and OpenAI's ChatGPT large language model to respond convincingly — if slowly — to spoken queries. When asked by Card whether Furbies are panning to take over the world as a demonstration of the project's capabilities, the skeletal robot replied in the affirmative — describing in a child-like synthesized voice that the plan includes "infiltrating households through [our] cute and cuddly appearance" before using their "advanced AI technology to manipulate and control their owners," an idea ChatGPT plagiarized word-for-word from a Futurism article published in 2017.
Card isn't the only hacker imbuing Furby with new and occasionally horrifying capabilities. Five years ago Sam Battle gave us the Furby Organ, while Howchoo's Zach tied one of the furry fiends into Amazon's Alexa platform with a Raspberry Pi Zero W. Two years ago Battle was back with a giant Furby-powered Apple Macintosh with facial recognition capabilities and unnecessarily distressing eyes and teeth, while Paul-Louis Ageneau took one apart to add USB control capabilities.
Card hasn't released source code or schematics for the project, but more information is available in her Twitter thread.