Spring Into AI
The Artifact
Week 4 submission of Spring into AI. A strange cube in the desert tells of daily AI advances in a human voice.
In week 4 Eric Rhea challenges us to calm the noise and produce something clear, unmistakable, unique, simple, and clean. Throw out the rules, it’s okay if people don’t like it. After all, this is about learning.
I opted for a small point and click adventure. Walking through the desert at night, the stars glint off something embedded far off in the sand. You walk up to it, investigate it, fiddle around with it and learn how to engage with it.
It sputters to life, a very minimal UI is appears. There’s only one way forward, no misunderstandings. You tap the Scan For Signals button. The Artifact scans AI field research articles, projects, and posts from arXiv, Github, Hugging Face, and X.
Through several steps outlined in the video below, it composites and classifies the research into a three-paragraph article, and speaks it aloud, with text highlights synced to the audio playback.
The YouTube video goes into great depth, there’s also the public repo below.
I was inspired by Jake Strait who really had an amazing submission. I was blown away by his idea of using crawling APIs, sending the data to Open AI for summary, and sending that data to ElevenLabs for text to speech. His UI was also very simple. I didn’t have to think about using it. That just came naturally.
Lessons learned: I really made this project a lot more difficult on myself because I didn’t really know what I wanted when I started, or really until the very end. I changed directions several times. I tried to build locally and manage my own stack to save Vercel tokens. That proved to be a huge cost in time.
I really focused hard on the atmosphere. Since Flash has been dead… the internet has been a boring place as far as immersive interactive experiences go. AI puts that back into reach.
I’m very thankful that I was able to participate in this conversation. I learned a ton, but I’m tired, it’s late, and I think the clock is about to skip an hour ahead for DST.