She Turned Her Whole Life Into Training Data—For an AI Baby

Quick Overview

Comedian and writer Sarah Rose Ciskin discusses using AI as a creative tool and details her experimental project, Fetus GPT, which involves training a language model on the audio data an unborn fetus has heard, leading to the realization that AI performance mirrors early human development, including making nonsensical errors like referencing pedophilia after hearing unrelated content.

Key Points: Sarah Rose Ciskin is training an AI model called Fetus GPT using only the MP3 and text files recorded from sounds her fetus has heard over five months, describing it as an "insane performance art thing." The training data for Fetus GPT includes diverse inputs such as a YouTube video on "lemur self-medication," troubleshooting microphone issues, snoring, Seinfeld, and work calls. Fetus GPT produced problematic output, once referencing pedophilia, which Ciskin equates to a toddler learning to swear, emphasizing that "AI is what we make it." Ciskin uses AI in her comedy writing process by separating it into divergent thinking (brainstorming/feeling safe to be weird) and convergent thinking (research/editing), finding it an "incredibly good assistant." The experiment highlights human efficiency compared to AI, noting humans extrapolate knowledge from little data while AI requires "tons and tons of knowledge," and humans are far more energy efficient. Ciskin shares an anecdote about a mutual friend whose life was saved after uploading blood work to ChatGPT, which alerted her to go to the ER when the doctor's office was closed because the AI was uncharacteristically confident and not hedging. Ciskin discovered through using a continuous blood glucose monitor and prompting ChatGPT that she needed to double her Lamotrigine dosage during pregnancy due to increased blood volume (clearance), which was life-changing.

Context: The discussion features comedian and science comedy writer Sarah Rose Ciskin, who runs the communications agency Hello Cyclom, being interviewed by Dan Schiffman about incorporating AI into creative work, particularly comedy writing. The central focus is Ciskin's "zany project" called Fetus GPT, an experiment where she records all ambient sounds a developing fetus hears to train a GPT-2 model from scratch, examining the resulting language model's performance as a parallel to early language acquisition.