Introducing TimBot

BY Tim Burrowes

June 22, 2023 10:05

You’re getting this post because you’re one of Unmade’s paying members, and we want you to be first to see what we’ve been working on.

We’ll be sharing this with Unmade’s wider audience tomorrow.

I’d like to introduce you to TimBot.

TimBot is our AI-driven media expert. He bases his information on the contents of my book Media Unmade, along with the last two years of Unmade’s archive.

Now, we’re ready for you to take a look. You’ll find TimBot at timbot.ai

Before you try him out, let me share some BIG caveats.

First: TimBot is a prototype. Sometimes he breaks. If he does so in an interesting way, please do send us a screenshot to cat@unmade.media

Second: Because TimBot’s computing power is driven by elements of both ChatGPT-3.5 and the recently updated ChatGPT-4, he can be slow, particularly when America is awake. If things are running really slowly, you may simply see an error message.

That’s why we’re sending you this note first thing, while America is asleep. If you leave it til later in the day, you may well get an error message.

This is a collaboration which has been led by the brilliant Nic Hodges at generative AI consultancy Fear of Missing Art, and inhouse by Unmade’s Cat McGinn. Cat is curating next month’s humAIn – human creativity X AI conference, and will talk more about TimBot there.

It’s not too late to buy a ticket. As one of Unmade’s paying members, you’re entitled to a discount – use the voucher code Unmade_Member.

Incidentally, based on our fantastic recent experiences on this project, I’d recommend you talk to FOMA about your own AI needs.

We’ve also been working with Abe’s Audio on this project. We’re hoping that by the time humAIn arrives, TimBot will be ready to speak to you too.

If you’re curious how TimBot works, we’ve tried to lean on OpenAI’s ChatGPT for what it does well and avoid what it does badly. ChatGPT offers amazing computing power, but as you have probably heard, can be prone to fantasise when it doesn’t know an answer.

Nic has designed TimBot in such a way that it surfaces what I’ve previously written as the basis of its information rather than what’s on the wider web. That means the information he’s aware of is more narrow, but his answers should be more accurate.

In the main, this is a proof of concept with applications for both book and journalism publishers. Can you take the knowledge and writing style of a particular writer and turn it into a useful chatbot?

The chart below shows what’s going on under the hood.

We use ChatGPT-3.5 to reformulate the user’s question, including pulling out relevant content from the book and newsletter. ChatGPT-3.5 then uses this to synthesise the best answer, which it finally passes along to the more powerful, but slower ChatGPT-4.

ChatGPT-4 then tidies up this answer and, based on my previous posts, attempts to recreate my own writing voice. As you’ll see, he’s chatty, but not entirely me, just yet.

It happens in a few seconds (and sometimes stalls). It’s certainly not as fast as typing a query into Google but it still feels kind of miraculous.

For what it’s worth, some of TimBot’s output has been uncanny. On occasion he has made connections between items I’ve written that I had not spotted myself.

And at the very least, he’s become a useful tool that saves me turning to the index of Media Unmade when I’ve been checking a reference or date.

Please do have a go. And remember, if you don’t feature in the book, or haven’t been written about on Unmade, TimBot is unlikely to be able to tell you much about yourself.