You’ve Never Seen a Spam Bot Like This One

When we speculate about the future of artificial intelligence (AI), we tend to focus on the high and lofty goals that we hope to achieve. Curing cancers, eliminating hunger, ending wars, and bringing about a new era of never-before-seen prosperity are among the most hoped-for results from the eventual development of superintelligent AIs. But reality rarely seems to line up with these sorts of Utopian dreams. The fact of the matter is that when a new, transformative technology becomes widely accessible, people with a wide range of motivations latch on to it for a variety of reasons — and those reasons are not all universally respected.

We are already experiencing this phenomenon with the current batch of generative AI tools. To be sure, there are many in industry and academia utilizing these tools with the goal of benefiting humanity. However, these same tools have also fallen into the hands of some of the least respected people on the planet — disreputable marketers. They have taken to image and video generators for help in rapidly creating a mountain of low-quality, and generally odd, marketing materials to fill up our inboxes and flood our social media feeds with the hope of separating us from our money.

Technically-inclined individuals, like readers of Hackster News, recognize this sort of junk for what it is. But those that are not up on the latest in AI may not understand how this technology is being used in an attempt to manipulate us. A conceptual artist that goes by the name ClownVamp is fed up with this current state of affairs, so he decided to expose it by building, of all things, a robot. Called The Junk Machine, this gaudy explosion of pink masquerading as a robot spits out custom prints of imagined junk mail to shine a light on the utter ridiculousness of slinging poorly-curated AI-generated garbage to millions and calling it a marketing strategy.

The Junk Machine has a very simple interface consisting of a single, large red button, a character LCD display, and a slot for prints to come out of. Inside the box is an NVIDIA Jetson single-board computer that runs a Stable Diffusion XL (SDXL) text-to-image generation algorithm entirely locally, which is made possible by the beefy GPU onboard the Jetson. When the button is pressed, SDXL is randomly prompted with one of over 40 prompts filled with vices and gluttony. The generated image is then printed out by a dye sublimation roll printer.

At present, the robot is making its rounds on exhibition. But even if you cannot see it in person, you could build something like it yourself. Building the entire robot would take some work (and artistic skill), but just installing SDXL on a Jetson and prompting it for some similar types of images would not be especially challenging. Or if you would rather bypass anything that resembles work and get a few large format prints to inspire your imagination (and disgust), ClownVamp has some available in his print shop.