And we have a new bard: Twitter user's AI clock composes a poem every minute

(Image: Twitter/Matt Webb)

A designer and blogger has created an artificial intelligence (AI)-powered clock that composes poems every minute to tell time.

Matt Webb says he used popular ChatGPT bot as the base for the desk clock, which has an old E-Ink display, similar to Amazon's Kindle devices, and is powered by a small, single board Raspberry Pi PC.

Speaking to The Verge, Webb said the AI clock can generate short two-line rhymes every minute based on the current time. Webb has been using OpenAI's language model for a while now and got an idea that connected the two concepts.

I made an AI clock for my bookshelves! It composes a new poem every minute using ChatGPT and mysteriously has this enthusiastic vibe which I am totally into https://t.co/HPFyCKoXABpic.twitter.com/eJb0QGpNmq

— Matt Webb (@genmon) March 17, 2023

Webb said the clock generates a single prompt on ChatGPT every minute and uses OpenAI's official API to display the response.

"The prompt instructs the AI to respond with two rhyming lines, and encourages it to be imaginative and profound,” said Webb.

The prompts also tell ChatGPT the current physical location of the clock, which means it can incorporate that into its poems. Webb shared these lines to drive home the point: "In cozy shelves, I do reside, / It’s nearly noon, the clock confides.”

Webb says he uses ChatGPT because it's cheaper than opting for OpenAI's full-scale language models. If he were to choose, Webb would love to use OpenAI's GPT-3 model, which he describes as "more complex and spicy" but it wasn't "quite worth 10x the cost for something sitting on my bookshelves”.

The response to the clock, so far, has been so good that Webb is considering releasing a DIY kit that will let users build one of their own or even full-scale commercial product that is easy plug-and-play.

For now, Webb has an update page that allows people to sign-up for a waitlist.