Rabbit Hole #3: ChatGPT + 3D Printer = ?
Automating the Human Touch
With AI and 3-D printers now in the hands of consumers, people are coming up with creative ways to make their lives easier and/or make money.
Today we’ll look at a simple idea and see how else we can improve upon it.
Starting Simple
Take a 3-D printer which contains a mechanism that moves along 3 dimensions and attach a pen to the end. With some programming and linking it to ChatGPT, you now have a way to complete hand-written homework. Education ethics aside, this is a project to get your feet wet with programming a 3-D printer and working with the ChatGPT.
While the idea of this is cool, it wouldn’t be difficult to spot that this wasn’t written by a human given it’s precision.
The Human Touch
How would you feel receiving a card fresh off the printer from your company after a year long of hard work and commitment? My guess would be you’d feel like just a number to them - another cog in the machine.
While it’s great to be able to automate everything to save costs and increase efficiency, there’s something about the human touch that is becoming increasingly more important with the rise of AI.
The YouTube channel Stuff Made Here explored how he could make the handwriting look more authentic when trying to automate the processing of writing cards for his audience.
He started by hand writing the letters of the alphabet multiple times and varying the choice, spacing and arrangements of the letters each time.
With this method, his wife was easily able to identify which cards were written by the robot.
He tried to implement machine learning to train a model for hand-writing however after many failed attempts resorted to an open source library called Handwriting Synthesis which implements Recurrent Neural Networks (RNNs) to create output that imitates human handwriting.
The outcome after sending his samples to a forensic handwriting expert was that they could be believed to be written by humans! It’s not to say that they’re perfect as across writing styles there was some distinctive characteristics shared.
Going “Full Send”
So how can money be made with this?
Here’s a thread of Aaron Francis creating an army of handwriting robots to write thousands of personalised messages for high values prospects and the addresses on an envelope: https://twitter.com/aarondfrancis/status/1438888219471491074
The automated handwriting robots are able to run 24/7 meaning your impact will be limitless.
In addition to the personalised messages, you can use ChatGPT to convey your messages in different tones depending on why you’re reaching out.
What’s Next?
We’ve covered automating homework, personalised cards and business prospect outreach. It’ll be exciting to see what people come up with next!