Tommy Falgout's "Bad AI in a Box" Spits Out Generative Advice, Recipes, and Insults on Demand

Maker and cloud solution architect Tommy Falgout has built a new way to interact with generative artificial intelligence (AI): the Bad AI in a Box.

"With the proliferation of AI in all things, I wanted to find a way to explore this new technology myself while also making something fun and quasi-useful," Falgout explains. "

"Even though the title is 'Bad AI,' I don't think that the AI is inherently evil, or even of low quality. In fact, quite the opposite! The main reason for calling it so is because the main scenario is to create an AI that gives out 'bad advice.' So, it's more of a naughty AI. BAIIAB is also [a palindrome] which makes me happy."

The heart of the Bad AI in a Box is a Raspberry Pi Zero W single-board computer, which is — as you might expect — contained within a box. Also inside the box, which was custom designed and 3D printed for the project, is a low cost thermal receipt printer, a four-line 20-column character display, and a rotary encoder which serves as the user's means of interaction.

Walking up to the box, the user twists the encoder to pick from a list of topics — ranging from advice to insults, recipes and cocktails to conspiracies and inspiration. Once a topic is selected, the AI — which isn't actually "in" the box, but rather hosted remotely on the Microsoft Azure Open AI Service — can be told that its output should be bad or silly, which affects the prompt sent to the service.

Using the prompt, the generative AI then returns a chunk of text in response — received by the Raspberry Pi Zero W and printed on the thermal printer. "It's fun to have something which I can give out to other people," Falgout explains of the physicality aspect.

The source code for the project is available on GitHub under the permissive MIT license. "I haven't documented the full process yet," Falgout admits, "but message me and I can share details with you."