Tag: twitter

The Most Important ChatGPT App Ever

~ Sean Nolan

I’ll grant that I have a relatively nerdy social circle — but it’s still sort of shocking just how many people I know are actually doing useful and interesting things with ChatGPT. Just a sampling:

Just to iterate what I’ve said before, I believe this thing is really real, and it behooves everyone to spend some time with it to build an intuition for what it is (and isn’t) good at. Like any technology, it’s important to have at least a basic understanding of how it works — otherwise folks that do will use it to take advantage of you. The fact that this technology appears to be sentient (hot take from Sean, see how I just dropped that in there?) doesn’t change the reality that people will use it to create phishing scams. Two of my past posts may help:

Anyways, all of this peer pressure got me thinking that I’d better do something important with ChatGPT too. And what could possibly be more important than creating more amusing content on Twitter? I know, right? Brilliant! So that’s what I did. And I figured I might as well write about how I did it because that might help some other folks stand on these impressive shoulders.

AI News Haiku

You’re definitely going to want to go visit @AINewsHaiku on Twitter (don’t forget to follow!). Three times a day, roughly just before breakfast, lunch and dinner, it randomly selects a top news story from United Press International, asks ChatGPT to write a “funny haiku” about it, and posts to Twitter. That’s it. Funny(-ish) haikus, three times a day.

The rest of this post is about how it works — so feel free to bail now if you’re not into the nerd stuff. Just don’t forget to (1) follow @AINewsHaiku, (2) tell all your friends to follow it too, and (3) retweet the really good ones. Be the trendsetter on this one. No pressure though.

The Code

I’ve reluctantly started to actually enjoy using Node for little projects like this. It’s super-easy to get going without a thousand complicated build/run steps or an IDE, and with a little discipline Javascript can be reasonably clean code. Have to be really careful about dependencies though — npm makes it really easy to pick up a billion packages, which can get problematic pretty quick. And “everything is async” is just stupid because literally nobody thinks about problems that way. But whatever, it’s fine.

There is not a lot of code, but it’s all on github. Clone the repo, create a “.env” file, and run “node .” to try it yourself. The .env file should look like this (details on the values later):

OPENAI_API_TOKEN=[OpenAI Secret Key]
TWITTER_API_APP_KEY=[Twitter Consumer API Key]
TWITTER_API_APP_SECRET=[Twitter Consumer API Secret]
TWITTER_API_ACCESS_TOKEN_KEY=[Twitter Authentication Access Token]
TWITTER_API_ACCESS_TOKEN_SECRET=[Twitter Authentication Access Secret]

index.js starts the party by calling into rss.js which loads the UPI “Top News” RSS feed and extracts titles and links (yes RSS still exists). xml2js is a nice little XML parser, a thankless job in these days of JSON everywhere.  You’ll also note that I’m importing “node-fetch” for the fetch API; it’s built-in in Node v18 but the machine where I’m running the cron jobs is locked to Node v16 so there you go.

Talking to Chat-GPT

After picking a random title/link combo, next up is openai.js which generates the haiku.. The OpenAI developer program isn’t free but it is really really cheap for this kind of hobby use; you can get set up at https://platform.openai.com. My three haikus a day using GPT-3.5 run somewhere on the order of $.10 per month. Of course, if you’re asking the system to write screenplays or talk for hours you could probably get into trouble. Live on the edge, and make sure to add your secret key into the .env file.

In its simplest form, using the chat API is just like talking to the models via the user interface. My prompt is “Write a funny haiku summarizing this topic: [HEADLINE]” which I send with a request that looks like this:

{
  "model": "gpt-3.5-turbo",
  "temperature": 0.5,
  "messages": [ "role": "user", "content": PROMPT ]
}

“model” is pretty obvious; I’m using v3.5 because it’s cheap and works great.

“temperature” is interesting — a floating point value between 0 and 2 that dials up and down the “randomness” of responses. In response to a given prompt, a temp of 0 will return pretty much the same completion every time, while 2 will be super-chaotic. 0.5 is a nice conservative number that leaves some room for creativity; I might try dialing it up a bit more as I see how it goes. There is also a parameter “top_p” which is similar-but-different, typical of many of the probabilistic dials that are part of these models.

I’ve sent a single element in the “messages” parameter, but this can become quite elaborate as a way to help explain to the model what you’re trying to do. The guide for prompt design is really fascinating and probably the best thing to read to start building that intuition for the system; highly recommended.

There are a bunch of other parameters you can use that help manage your costs, or to generate multiple completions for the same prompt, that kind of thing.

The JSON you get back contains a bunch of metadata about the interaction including the costs incurred (expressed as “tokens,” a vague concept corresponding to common character sequences in words; you can play with their tokenizer here). The completion text itself is in the “choices” array, which will be length == 1 unless you’ve asked for multiple completions.

Over time it’s going to be interesting to see just how challenging the economics of these things become. Training big models is really, really computationally-expensive. At least until we have some significant quantitative and/or qualitative change in the way its done, only big companies are really going to be in the game. So while I’m sure we’ll see pretty fierce competition between the usual suspects, there’s a big risk that the most revolutionary technology of the century is going to be owned by a very small number of players.

For now, just have fun and learn as much as you can — it’ll pay off no matter what our weirdo economic system ends up doing.

And… Tweet!

Honestly I thought this was going to be the easiest part of this little dalliance, but the chaos that is Twitter clearly extends to its API. It’s bad in pretty much every way: 2+ versions of the API that overlap a lot but not entirely; four different authentication methods that apply seemingly randomly to the various endpoints; constantly changing program/pricing structure with all kinds of bad information still in the documentation. Worst of all, the API requires signed requests which pretty much makes calling their REST endpoints without a library enormously painful. Wow.

Having tried a few libraries and trial-and-errored my way through a few approaches, the actual code in twitter.js isn’t bad at all — but the journey to get there was just stupid. To try and save you some time:

  • Sign up for free access at https://developer.twitter.com/en/portal/dashboard. They will try to direct you to “Basic” access but this is $100/month; don’t be fooled.
  • You’ll get a default “Project” and “App” … scroll to the bottom of the app “Settings” and choose “Edit” under “User Authentication Settings.” Make sure you have read/write permissions selected (you won’t at first). A bunch of fields on this page are required even if you’re not going to use them — just do your best until they let you hit “Save.”
  • Now under “Keys & Tokens” choose “Regenerate” for “Consumer Keys / API Key and Secret” and “Authentication Tokens / Access Token and Secret” … save these values and add them to the appropriate spots in your .env file.

This will set you up to call the v2 method to post a tweet using the OAuth v1.0a authentication model. There are surely many other ways you can get things working, but that was mine. I also chose to use the twitter-api-v2 library to manage the noise — it does a fine job trying to hide the dog’s breakfast that it wraps. At least for now. Until Elon gets into a slap-fight with Tim Berners-Lee and decides to ban the use of HTTPS.

You’re Welcome!

The point of all this (beyond the excellent haiku content which you should definitely follow) was just to get some hands-on experience with the API for ChatGPT. Mission accomplished, and I’m really quite impressed with how effective it is, especially given the speed at which they’re moving. I just have to figure out how to reliably tell the model to limit content to 250 characters, because until I do that I’m not going to be able to release @AINewsLimerick or @AINewsSonnet. The world is waiting!

The Elon / Twitter Bummer

~ Sean Nolan

Let’s get this out of the way up front: if you’re here expecting more snarky piling on about how stupid Elon Musk is, you’re going to have to get your schadenfreude fix elsewhere. Frankly, I think he’s a genius. A singular individual of our time that most fairly should be compared with Thomas Edison. But the whole Twitter thing really bums me out, because it makes obvious just how easily an unchecked strength can become a stunning downfall. It’s worth a few words; hopefully ones that will add a little bit of thoughtfulness to a mostly empty public “conversation.” We will see.

First let’s review a couple of the things Elon Musk has contributed to the world.

SpaceX

I’ve long been a believer in space exploration, so it’ll be no surprise that I have followed SpaceX since its earliest days. Back in 2002, Musk made a trip to Russia to acquire rockets at a commercially-reasonable price. The Russians basically told him he was an idiot and that it couldn’t be done. ON THE PLANE HOME, he put together a spreadsheet that showed that he could. His own people though he was nuts at first, but he was right. He surrounded himself with experts ranging from amateur to professional. He seeded money to folks and watched what happened. And most importantly he read, and read, and read. To call out just a few specifics he has cited:

… and then he made it happen. Bigtime. SpaceX is still today*** the only American company that can launch people into space. He puts satellites up for about $1,200 per pound (the Shuttle was $30,000). He has used the capability to launch Starlink, bringing the Internet to people and places previously left behind. The scope of what he has done here is stunning. No gimmicky “tourism.” He has never flown himself. He is simply knocking down real problems, one after another, while most others just second-guess from the sidelines.

Think space doesn’t matter? You’re dead wrong, but OK. How about climate change?

Tesla

It seems I can’t go a day without hearing Fleetwood Mac shill Chevy “EVs for Everyone.” Just like every other car company, Chevy would love you for you to believe that this was all their idea, but in reality they (together with all the usual suspects) have been slow-boating electrics since the 1980s. Not so Elon, who first invested in Tesla in 2004, and launched the Roadster in 2009 as CEO — more than a decade ago. We got our Model X in 2018 and it is straight up the best car I’ve ever owned.

What made the difference with Tesla was not new science, but a willingness to buck conventional wisdom as to what was “production ready.” Rather than whine about a lack of charging infrastructure, they designed the Supercharger and deployed enough of them that I’ve comfortably road-tripped the entire west coast of the USA multiple times. For daily use we haven’t even installed a dedicated charger of our own — we do just fine with a standard wall outlet. Software completes the package: we can safely leave our dog in a climate-controlled car; get automatically-recorded video of accidents or attempted theft; watch Netflix in the ferry line; verify that the doors are locked from our phones; ask it to extract itself from a tight parking space. I’m not allowed to take my hands off the wheel quite yet, but the Tesla drives itself way more than I do — stops at lights, changes lanes, you name it.

And sure they’ve been expensive so far, but at a base price of $47k the Model 3 is within striking distance of “normal” cars. It’s not a stretch to say that the EV industry is at a tipping point today directly because of what Elon has accomplished with Tesla over the past thirteen years.

But wait, there’s more. Tesla has used learning from the cars to become an energy company. One of my son’s best friends is kept busy way more than full-time installing Tesla Solar Roofs across the western half of the country. The Powerwall uses software to optimize power management — even automatically “topping up” the charge when severe weather is in the forecast.

I could keep going like this for a long time. And it’s easy for folks to talk about how nobody should be a billionaire or whatever, but he earned his money creating and selling things people want. His start in business was a $28k loan from his dad — a nice advantage to be sure, but turning $28k into $200B (legally) is a pretty good record and doesn’t happen by accident.

So then WTF happened?

In almost every case, Elon’s success has come down to “just doing” things that conventional wisdom said couldn’t be done. But it’s not a Zuckerberg “move fast and break things” vibe. He really listens to the arguments and the experts and the ideas — he is smart enough to understand what he learns — and only then he makes his call. Educated, but not encumbered, by those that have come before him. It’s just damn impressive.

The thing is, though, a key reason he can ignore the preconceptions of others is that he doesn’t have a ton of empathy for them (clinically it seems). Honestly he said it best himself on SNL:

“To anyone who I’ve offended [with my Twitter posts], I just want to say I reinvented electric cars, and I’m sending people to Mars in a rocket ship. Did you think I was also going to be a chill, normal dude?”

It’s funny because it’s true. The same quality that helps him ignore naysayers also keeps him from understanding the positions of folks that attack him (rightly or wrongly). Especially in the anonymous public sphere. I mean, it’s hard for anybody to turn the other cheek online — throw in some mental instability and it’s just not a shocker when he reacts without thinking.

With Twitter, this all just spun wildly out of control. He’s mad that people are mean to him on Twitter, and because he’s the richest guy in the freaking world his answer is to just buy it and kick off the people he doesn’t like. Obviously he regretted this just days after he set it in motion. But he’d gone too far and was legally required to finish what he started. And the real kicker this time is that — in stark contrast to his other ventures — with Twitter he didn’t do his homework. So in practice he’s just another clueless a$$hat money exec who shows up assuming he knows better. But he doesn’t. And that is exactly what we are seeing play out as he flails and reacts, flails and reacts, flails and reacts.

It just makes me really very sad.

I’m not asking you to feel sorry for the richest man in the world. And I’m not making excuses for this complete sh**show; it could have serious negative implications for all of us. It’s just a bummer to watch it unfold. I hope that history is able to remember both sides of the Elon story, because we’ll all still be benefiting from what he’s built long after people forget what a tweet was.

*** Between the time I wrote the first draft of this piece and published it, NASA finally launched the behemoth that is Artemis on its first trip around the moon. They haven’t put humans in the capsule yet, but it does appear we’re going to have a second option. Awesome, but that program feels a bit like a relic from the 80s. I hope it goes ok!