Meet IdiotBox, a Chat Navigator with ChatGPT
The search engine is a horse & buggy to the chatbot automobile. Allow us to introduce the Discovery Horse, a chat navigation companion for traversing the web - somewhere between search, chatbot & pet.
“If I asked my customers what they wanted they’d ask for faster horses.” - Henry Ford
Category creators, like Henry Ford, built something people didn’t yet know they wanted.. until they couldn’t live without it. Many of us still don’t know what we want.. but we want it faster. Our product aims to get us to slow down and process information for a change into knowledge. More on that shortly.
ChatGPT is the Model-T of AI chatbots powering another industrial revolution. History doesn’t exactly repeat, but it rhymes so here’s a poem about Henry Ford and AI generated with the technology itself within our product demo:
Stupid Simple Chat Navigation
IdiotBox makes anyone feel like Harry Potter-turned-hacker with voice prompts and commands opening a wide range of use cases. We believe this has potential to be a category creator of sorts, “Chat Navigation”, a new means of interfacing with technology in conversation, perhaps “ChatNav” for short.
Talk to the computer and it talks back letting users summon and summarize information on-demand regardless of the ability to or inclination to read or write, tailoring that information to one’s level of knowledge in a given subject.
AI superpowers are here and only now are we truly going to see the great leveling of the playing field the internet was meant to usher in.
Chat Navigation via the “Discovery Horse”
Train your very own personal algorithm and ChatNav browsing companion, we call the Discovery Horse!
Our goal with the Discovery Horse is to be able to converse with the chatbot, entering prompts to generate results, but also have the bot challenge our questions and framing, ultimately helping us ask better questions — the key to a problem half solved.
We’re attempting to build something people will come to love and humanity needs, a whimsical way to make sense of the world and find ourselves and purpose in the process. It’s our attempt to get people to slow down with information, grapple with ideas and suspend quick judgements — to “Think Fast and Slow” as we’ll discuss in a future post exploring the book of that title by Daniel Kahneman, Nobel Prize winner.
Why now?
We have the opportunity before us to get the web right this time and avoid yet another “confirmation bias engine” echo chamber as we’ve seen in social media and search to some extent. And simply bolting AI ChatBots onto the side of search results isn’t taking this technology to its full potential. It’s time we just dumb it down and tell these computers what to do.. and gently remind them they work for us! :)
In all seriousness, there is some gravity to what we’re doing in dealing with AI but the real threat is not so much some Terminator-esque outcome, the greatest harm is it rendering us into morons, totally dependent on technology.
Technology should instill self-reliance, stoke lifelong learning and curiosity while helping us save time to then spend more of it in the real world.. on non-tech stuff that adds real value in our lives instead of essentially just harvesting our eyeballs.
I suspect many have had their ability to think critically atrophy over the last decade. I’m no exception, that’s why I’m now an aspiring iDi0t — a curious fool, just smart enough to know what I don’t know but driven enough to find out and put that information to work or grapple with it rendering some newfound knowledge.
At IdiotBox, we’re on a mission to:
Reimagine how we
browsetraverse the web, in order toNot just retrieve information but suss out insights
Slow down to a “trot” to retain information and process it into knowledge
Challenge our thinking and framing to formulate better questions.
Create tools to capture insights and make connections between disparate ideas
Enhance our ability to tell stories with on-demand visuals and curation tools
Future Plans: Bridge AI and web3
Currently, the web app is powered by ChatGPT 3.5 but we recently got ChatGPT-4 API access as well as Plugins which will help us bridge Search and Chat, almost as middleware software between the two.
IdiotBox started out as a vision for a sort of NFT TV and crypto wallet. It currently has some web3 features implemented, however, we’re back-burning that and focusing solely on getting Chat Navigation and Knowledge Creation.
The BIG idea here is to connect ideas.
Eventually, we will circle back to web3 to incentivize the uncovering of insights and making connections between ideas, finally telling better stories about those learnings. In other words:
Create economic rewards for knowledge creation by
Tagging parts of images for additional AI model training on subset data
Rewards for highlighting lines of chatbot text results and tagging them as a concept or making connections between different concepts.
In doing so, we could make leaps and bounds in leveling up AI beyond the current hype into a true source of on-demand knowledge and the ability to act on it.
We aim to achieve this with what we call the red “WhimStick” pictured below, a sort of joystick for navigation but also a pin to drop onto the main screen to tag areas of images in order to catalog what’s taking place in the scene.
Mitigating the Deep Fake Problem
The second reason why we must connect AI to web3, that is to say on-demand knowledge creation and the internet of value — it’s a matter of security.
These AI tools could allow bad actors to generate fake images to do people harm, spread disinformation or other mischievous to malevolent activities not even yet imagined.
Essentially, the underpinnings of cryptocurrency and web3 technologies is public-private key encryption and decryption. This enables users to verify the source of information proven mathematically in order to identify falsehoods and scams ultimately creating a web of trust, truth and value creation.
This connection has never been clearer to me. The two technologies are not just new kids on the block, they’re the only broad base technologies that will affect every vertical atop them. They must work in conjunction if we’re going to do this right.
Leading with love and whimsy
In conclusion, I implore you all to take the fear mongering from AI naysayers with a grain of salt (and a hint of lime, happy Cinco de Mayo :) Rather, suspend judgement and explore what is possible if we contribute to this technological revolution and bravely face change, however uncomfortable it may seem at first. Remember, technology is a tool and tools will always be used for good and bad ends.
I’m asking you consider framing the outlook as AI being “partly cloudy with a 10% of total annihilation” to “mostly sunny with a 90% chance of saving the world.” Those are odds I happily take when we’re up against some of the toughest challenges man has ever faced in the search of truth and justice — to not just survive but thrive.
Enough with the heavy though. Let’s have fun! Lets learn for the sake of learning, for individual growth and shared understanding to bridge differences and solve problems through AI superpowers. I am ready to lead with love and embrace this new world, please join me — sign up for my occasional emails in the spirit of discovery.