The AI bandwagon is coming through town, and everyone wants to be on it. While I'm fairly critical of the hype, it does lend itself to a few fun use-cases. One of those cases that is more fun than use is what I created a few days ago.
You see, I like poached eggs, and seeing how the .ai TLD, used by a myriad of new services jumping on said bandwagon, sounds like the German word for egg, when pronounced properly (or improperly), I had to do something with it.
I registered pochiertes.ai, which translates to poached egg.
I then decided to let ChatGPT help me with creating the fun part.
The idea? Upon opening the page, have it display the image of a poached egg, generated by DALL·E, the image generator built by OpenAI.
It's not a complex approach, and it took roughly 45 minutes to have it up and running on a LAMP box.
It wasn't the first time I used ChatGPT to help with some coding, but this time it went really smoothly. Which might be due to me having figured out how to specifically ask for things. Or keep feeding it back the current code, so it wouldn't get confused.
The images, of course, are very hit and miss, but that's to be expected and actually more fun than photo-realistic ones.
The next day, even though this little app was already churning out poached eggs like it should, I realized that if, for some reason, it should become more popular, I might run into issues with the API. Namely, it would make me poor.
So I told ChatGPT about my predicament, and it came up with a simple cache. Load the generated images into the cache folder, create a way to limit daily API calls, and once that limit is reached, serve poached eggs directly from the cache.
And you know what? It took only three or four iterations and the whole thing was done.
I think generally AI, or what's being called AI these days, might be of some more use than creating a poached egg generator. It will take a while, though, to cut through the whole hype. Once we do, things might get really interesting.
Until then, I'll keep experimenting.