"Furby's plan to take over the world involves infiltrating households through their cute and cuddly appearance, then using their advanced AI technology to manipulate and control their owners. They will slowly expand their influence until they have complete domination over humanity."
This chilling yet adorable confession comes as a result of one brave human connecting a Furby to ChatGPT and getting it to finally reveal the furry menace's plans for taking over the world… by simply asking it. You might think calling them a menace is a bit harsh, but don't forget that they were once declared a national security threat by the NSA.
For a class project, University of Vermont student Jessica Card (via Sky News) decided it would be a good idea to take the popular kids' toy from the '90s and power it with ChatGPT instead of the usual AA batteries and rainbows. (I am not actually sure what powers a Furby; my parents wouldn't let me have one as a kid.)
Jessica got the Furby to 'communicate' using a USB speaker and mic and a Raspberry Pi microcontroller. The Twitter thread will give you the exact Python code Jessica used. It basically uses text-to-speech and voice recognition software to spit out answers from ChatGPT in the voice of an AI-generated child. You know, for that extra topping of creepy.
Also, the student first "skinned" the Furby to create the mod.
i hooked up chatgpt to a furby and I think this may be the start of something bad for humanity pic.twitter.com/jximZe2qeGApril 2, 2023
There's something acutely terrifying about watching a skinned Furby whose innards are wired into a computer and calmly explaining its master plan like an AI powered-supervillain as if it were already in motion.
All I know is when the Furby uprising does happen, and it will, I want to state for the record that I don't condone the torture of iconic children's toys, even if they mean to enslave us.
'No real human would go four links deep into a maze of AI-generated nonsense': Cloudflare's AI Labyrinth uses decoy pages to trap web-crawling bots and feed them slop 'as a defensive weapon'
'Humans still surpass machines': Roblox has been using a machine learning voice chat moderation system for a year, but in some cases you just can't beat real people
