Anyone who has suspected that Furby, the defining toy of the 1990s, has a slightly sinister undertone may have recently been proven correct.
Jessica Card, a Vermont engineering student, connected a Furby to her ChatGPT program, which produced strange results, with the furry beast divulging its plan for absolute global dominance.
The University of Vermont student demonstrated a Furby — an electric toy with an owl-like appearance — stripped of its fur and with only its eyes and beak left answering questions using artificial intelligence software in a video uploaded on Twitter.
The encounter begins as normally as a stripped-down robotic devil toy can, with the toy politely asking the person behind the camera what they want to talk about.
“Was there a secret Furbies plot to take over the world?” a voice thought to be Card’s inquired of the critter.
It blinks a few times before responding after pausing to collect its thoughts on conquering the earth.
“I’m thinking about what you said,” the prospective ruler muses before offering a terrifying response.
@jessicard / Sci + Tech / TMX
“Furbies’ plan to take over the world involves infiltrating households through their cute and cuddly appearance,” it explains. “Then using their advanced AI technology to manipulate and control their owners.”
The small robot’s strategy didn’t finish there.
“They will gradually expand their influence until they have complete dominance over humanity,” the report said.
“I think this may be the start of something bad for humanity,” Card wrote on Twitter.
Card utilized a Raspberry Pi, a small device popular among beginners in programming, to make the Furby from hell.
i hooked up chatgpt to a furby and I think this may be the start of something bad for humanity pic.twitter.com/jximZe2qeG
— jessica card (@jessicard) April 2, 2023
“For my verbal prompt, I use Python’s SpeechRecognition lib to record the audio from a USB mic, and then send that to @OpenAI‘s Whisper lib to transcribe,” Card wrote in a tweet. “That gets sent to ChatGPT”.
To hear the response, the text from ChatGPT was run through a system called Narakeet, which was played through a USB speaker.
