$$$CASH$$$ proposal - “Putrid Pneumatics”
“Shoggoth with a Smiley Face” via Know Your Meme
The Brief
At their core, LLM's are probability driven predictors that have no innate knowledge of what it is saying - stochastic parrots, etc... - but through the use of RLHF and a lot of advertising spin, they've being sold as friends or personal assistants, which is so far from what they actually are as to be insulting. In fact, they are so inhuman that they are literally driving people insane, as is now being widely documented.
An 1810 diagram of the Air Loom by Mathews via Wikimedia Commons
I want to drive home just how far from rational human thought they are by tying it in with (what is widely believed) to be the first documented case of schizophrenia - where in 1797 James Tilly Matthews disrupted a session of the British house of commons shouting “Treason!” and was subsequently admitted to hospital care. Through treatment, it was revealed that he believed he was under the influenced by a device he described as an Air Loom, or a device that was being controlled by shadowy remote gangs that operated via pneumatic chemistry to send malodourous thoughts or, as Tilly put it, “putrid pneumatics” directly into his head.
(A great writeup about this history and the origins of the “influencing machine” commonly cited by schizophrenics - as is now cited by those suffering from AI psychosis - can be found here - https://darianwest.medium.com/the-amazing-origin-of-schizophrenia-e105f35ef3b6)
To that end, I’d like to make a kinetic art piece that uses compressed air to run a computer that is loaded LLM that only outputs absolutely insane or conspiratorial statements. Practically, this will take the form of a steam engine driven by a compressed air source being used to turn a small dynamo. This in turn will power an SBD like a Raspberry Pi + AI hat or something like a Nvidia Jetson that has a low-parameter open source LLM loaded onto it, maybe something like an 8 million parameter version of DeepSeek, tuned so that it is breaking its own guardrails and is prompted with conspiratorial concepts. The LLM output will be displayed via a small e-ink monitor attached to the piece. Finally, and critically - the compressed air source for the piece will be loaded with a very unpleasant odor so that when the steam engine exhausts, that odor will be vented into surrounding area so that everyone around the piece will be privy to just how unpleasant it is.
Physically, the work will be arranged somewhat like a miniature server rack, but with the exception that the steam engine occupies the lower areas of the rack and the SBC + screen take up the top, almost like a console on a rack. The only input to the freestanding piece would be the compressed air source via air hose. I’ll have spinning pieces and wires running throughout, and I think it’ll be appropriate to style it as a sort of janky steampunk, tying it back to Tilly’s period. To share it, I’ll produce a project video and a blog post that covers the piece.
Practicalities / $
This is an idea I’ve been cultivating for a while, but it’ll cost a bit of $$$cash$$$ to purchase all of the required components. Primarily the steam engine and LLM-ready SBC. Roughly those costs are:
Steam Engine Kit - $399
Dynamo kit (machined) - $109
NVIDIA Jetson Orin™ Nano SBC - $249
E-Paper display - $162
Some sort of battery + current smoothing circuitry to smooth out the dynamo output - ~$50
Materials for the frame, like steel angle and bolts - ~$150
Misc. tooling that I’ll inevitably need - ~$50
Total: ~ $1,169
To that effect, I think I could do this for that budget, but more money would allow for a more extravagant / expedited built. If that’s too much, I can also fund part of that total, but I can’t afford to do this with less than $800 in funding.
Challenges
Well, it’s primarily timeline. Putting this together will take some tweaking, but nothing within it is so far outside of my wheelhouse as to be completely unreasonable. The one area I do not have experience with would be the tweaking of the LLM, which would be a fully new learning set - That said, there are likely enough resources on the subject that I wouldn’t be starting from absolute scratch.
Strengths
In regards to making complicated things like this - I have a fair amount of experience - https://www.macpierce.com/wsowsb
I’m also very comfortable documenting the build process of projects and making them open source - https://www.macpierce.com/the-camera-shy-hoodie
I also have experience making project videos to convey complicated projects - https://www.macpierce.com/including-the-kitchen-sink
I also really really want to make this thing. I think it’ll be utterly ridiculous while still conveying the point, which is where most of my work functions best.
Thanks for reading, and I hope we get to work together. The <NGH> server has been a wonderfully generative space, and it’d be really cool to work on a project that was spawned through it.
- Mac