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Trip Venturella released Mr. Chatterbox, a language model trained entirely on out-of-copyright text from the British Library. Here's how he describes it:
Mr. Chatterbox is a language model trained entirely from scratch on a corpus of over 28,000 Victorian-era British texts published between 1837 and 1899, drawn from a dataset made available by the British Library. The model has absolutely no training inputs from after 1899 — the vocabulary and ideas are formed exclusively from nineteenth-century literature.
Mr. Chatterbox's training corpus was 28,035 books, with an estimated 2.93 billion input tokens after filtering. The model has roughly 340 million paramaters, roughly the same size as GPT-2-Medium. The difference is, of course, that unlike GPT-2, Mr. Chatterbox is trained entirely on historical data.
Given how hard it is to train a useful LLM without using vast amounts of scraped, unlicensed data I've been dreaming of a model like this for a couple of years now. What would a model trained on out-of-copyright text be like to chat with?
Thanks to Trip we can now find out for ourselves!
The model itself is tiny, at least by Large Language Model standards - just 2.05GB on disk. You can try it out using Trip's HuggingFace Spaces demo:
Honestly, it's pretty terrible. Talking with it feels more like chatting with a Markov chain than an LLM - the responses may have a delightfully Victorian flavor to them but it's hard to get a response that usefully answers a question.
The 2022 Chinchilla paper suggests a ratio of 20x the parameter count to training tokens. For a 340m model that would suggest around 7 billion tokens, more than twice the British Library corpus used here. The smallest Qwen 3.5 model is 600m parameters and that model family starts to get interesting at 2b - so my hunch is we would need 4x or more the training data to get something that starts to feel like a useful conversational partner.
But what a fun project!
Running it locally with LLM
I decided to see if I could run the model on my own machine using my LLM framework.
I got Claude Code to do most of the work - here's the transcript.
Trip trained the model using Andrej Karpathy's nanochat, so I cloned that project, pulled the model weights and told Claude to build a Python script to run the model. Once we had that working (which ended up needing some extra details from the Space demo source code) I had Claude read the LLM plugin tutorial and build the rest of the plugin.
llm-mrchatterbox is the result. Install the plugin like this:
llm install llm-mrchatterbox
The first time you run a prompt it will fetch the 2.05GB model file from Hugging Face. Try that like this:
llm -m mrchatterbox "Good day, sir"
Or start an ongoing chat session like this:
llm chat -m mrchatterbox
If you don't have LLM installed you can still get a chat session started from scratch using uvx like this:
uvx --with llm-mrchatterbox llm chat -m mrchatterbox
When you are finished with the model you can delete the cached file using:
llm mrchatterbox delete-model
This is the first time I've had Claude Code build a full LLM model plugin from scratch and it worked really well. I expect I'll be using this method again in the future.
I continue to hope we can get a useful model from entirely public domain data. The fact that Trip was able to get this far using nanochat and 2.93 billion training tokens is a promising start.
Tags: ai, andrej-karpathy, generative-ai, local-llms, llms, ai-assisted-programming, hugging-face, llm, training-data, uv, ai-ethics, claude-code
Pippin Barr tests your attention span with weirdly meditative slowed-down remakes of Pong, Breakout, and Missile Command #
By Mimi Lamarre
Dec. 9, 1998.
The post arrives unceremoniously. Just a single user posting on an internal bulletin. Then, it spreads to a series of messages circulating through secure offices in Fort Meade, Maryland.
By the following week, employees inside one of the most secretive intelligence agencies in the world are given a new directive: a certain category of device is no longer permitted inside the building. Anyone who has brought one in is instructed to remove it immediately.
The devices are small enough to sit unobtrusively on a desk — battery-powered, inexpensive, and widely available in stores across the country. No one can say exactly how many have already made their way into the building. What worries agents most is that they might be able to listen, store fragments of information, and repeat them later, transmitting top-secret information.
In a place where nearly every conversation contains something classified, the possibility alone is enough to cause worry.
Within weeks, the restriction spreads beyond Fort Meade. The Pentagon considers it a security threat. A naval shipyard circulates similar advisories. National airlines warn against use during plane take-offs and landings. Hospitals overseas remove them from their wards.
But these objects are already everywhere. Millions of them have entered American homes only months earlier in thin cardboard toy boxes with plastic casings. They are the envy of every school-aged child. The latest obsession. The newest fad.
Six inches tall, running on AA batteries with oversized eyes, soft fur, and a habit of speaking in strange, babbling sounds that gradually give way, almost imperceptibly, to English words.
No one can say what they might hear, what they might repeat. Or where those words might end up.
And by the time anyone starts asking these questions, it is already too late.
A month earlier, on November 27, 1998, the sun is just beginning to rise over a Kay-Bee outlet in the Baldwin Hills Crenshaw Plaza in Los Angeles.
Outside the store, about 250 people have gathered, the line curling out of the entrance and into the parking lot. Many are parents with young children, standing hand in hand, shifting in place to keep warm in the early morning air. Some arrived before dawn. Others showed up just minutes before opening, hoping luck might be enough.
Everyone knows what they are here for.
At exactly six o’clock, the doors slide open.
The line surges forward, not quite running, but moving with a shared urgency — an unspoken understanding that hesitation might mean missing out entirely.
Inside, the first wave of shoppers spreads quickly through the aisles. Their eyes lock on what they’ve come for and grubby hands reach out to grab the loot from shelves.
Within minutes, they emerge again, bags tucked under their arms or slung over their shoulders, their expressions controlled but unmistakable. Relief. Satisfaction. Something closer to victory than to purchase.
Then the next group is allowed in. And the next.
Toward the back of the line, the mood begins to shift. People check their watches. Some have work to get to. Others need to get their children to school. The margin for waiting is shrinking.
Around eight o’clock, the store manager steps outside.
“I’m so sorry,” they say. “There are none left.”
For a moment, the crowd doesn’t move.
Then the reaction comes all at once — voices rising, questions overlapping, frustration breaking through. A few people shout. Others laugh in disbelief. Expletives fly, hands are reflexively thrown over the ears of school-aged ears.
The lucky ones who are leaving with purchases adjust their grips, angling their bags away from the frustrated crowd, protecting their haul from the eyes and prying hands of the less fortunate. They move quickly, eyes forward.
They waited two hours for this toy.
A similar scene plays out 2,700 miles away, where customers towards the dreaded back of the line get so ornery that police are called to the local Wal-Mart in Tewksbury, Massachusetts.
In each case, what starts as anticipation curdles into something else — resentment, disbelief, the sense that something critical is happening and that everyone else has somehow gotten there first.
The toy itself is unassuming: roughly the size of a grapefruit, covered in brightly colored faux fur. It looks like an improbable cross between an owl, a hamster, and something vaguely extraterrestrial. Its ears protrude almost as much as its wide, blinking eyes. Its small, beak-like mouth opens and closes as it speaks in a language that sounds structured but unfamiliar.
People treat this object like it’s invaluable, even though it’s just a colorful rodent-like toy called a Furby.
Jenny Sparks is a web developer and graphic designer. Lars Norpchen is an engineer and a programmer. They’re both self-described nerds with a penchant for building things, and taking them apart.
Married, and co-owners of a video game company, neither of them set out to investigate anything.
They, like so many customers in cities across the country, just decide to buy a Furby. In fact, they manage to grab the very last one off the shelves of their local department store. Jenny carries it home and sets it on their cluttered desks overlooking downtown San Francisco, the Bay Bridge and the iconic illuminated Coca-Cola billboard in the distance.
At first, their Furby is a curiosity. They turn it over in their hands. Watch it react. Note the way it responds to sound, to light, to movement. The eyes blink. The ears twitch. It makes small, incoherent sounds.
Bye-bye-oo-bah. Bar-bar. Nah-bah.
It’s responsive. But not entirely predictable. That part stands out.
Jenny and Lars have both worked with systems before. Inputs, outputs. Cause and effect. The Furby doesn’t always behave that way. Sometimes it reacts immediately. Sometimes there is a delay. Sometimes it does something that doesn’t seem connected to anything.
It feels off, in a way that’s hard to define. It doesn’t behave like other toys they’ve known.
Then, on the third day, everything stops.
No movement. No sound. Even after replacing the batteries.
Whatever was animating it, whatever made it feel alive, is gone.
So they open it.
Lars pulls out a pair of scissors and unceremoniously skins the toy of its faux fur (a grotesque act by any measure) before prying open the rotund plastic of its body to get at what’s beneath.
Inside, they find something surprisingly simple: a single motor connected to a system of gears and levers that controls everything — the eyes, the ears, the mouth. Every movement is part of one continuous mechanism.
What seemed like complexity is, in reality, coordination. What felt like life is, in reality, design.
The Furby that Jenny Sparks and Lars Norpchen took apart and posted on the website Furby Autopsy. Courtesy: Jenny Sparks.
They look at each other. People need to see this.
Jenny wakes her sleeping desktop computer, dials up the internet — remember, it’s the ‘90s — and opens a browser. She uses some basic code to write a program for a new website. She posts photographs of their dismantled toy — its fur stripped away, its internal structure exposed, and types out a post:
The Furby Autopsy website, as originally posted by Jenny Sparks and Lars Norpchen. Source: https://www.phobe.com/furby/
She names the site, semi-ominously: Furby Autopsy.
Within days, the emails begin to arrive. By the end of the week, there are hundreds. People are writing in furiously. They’re reporting Furbies that are coming back to life — even after batteries die. They write of toys that are speaking in full sentences, repeating words that have never been taught. And of voices dropping low and even demonic.
There is a Furby that survived a house fire.
Others babble all night long, even when they aren’t provoked or prompted.
One parent insists that the toy cursed in front of their child.
A child writes in to ask whether it is true that a local radio station had cut the toy open and found real blood inside.
The stories spread quickly, passed along through early message boards and email chains, each one slightly more detailed, slightly more certain than the last.
Posts from a Google Group about Furbies from 1998 to 2000. Source: Google. https://groups.google.com/g/alt.toys.furby/c/vOg2pXlIY0U
And a single explanation begins to take hold: It must be listening. It must be remembering. And then learning, too.
Once that idea is in place, everything else starts to fit around it. Underneath all of it — beneath the emails, the posts, the stories — is something harder to pin down. A kind of low-level unease.
Never before had a toy seemingly mimicked a human brain in this way. And never before had a human brain been so puzzled by how a toy worked.
To understand the speculation, the fear, and the real, visceral concern, we have to rewind the clock a year-and-a-half, back to a convention floor in Manhattan, where two toymakers had recently arrived at the 1997 Toy Fair, looking for an idea.
There’s a low-level murmur in the Javits Center, the constant noise of a thousand competing ideas paired with the whir of motors inside toys that promise to be the next big thing. At every booth, plastic clatters over the sound of half-heard sales pitches. This is the mecca for toymakers. There are more than 1,700 exhibitors and 20,000 buyers. And standing, looking out at the endless array of exhibits inside the building, are Dave Hampton and Caleb Chung, two toy industry veterans on the hunt for the next big toy.
The idea, when it finally comes, feels almost improbable. Something small. Strange. Difficult to categorize. But to understand where it comes from, you first have to understand Dave Hampton.
Even his beginnings were unusual. He was supposed to be born in February of 1952, but after his mother slipped on ice, he arrived early — December 18, 1951. Doctors later realized the premature birth had likely saved his life; he had been absorbing fluid incorrectly in the womb and might not have survived a full-term pregnancy. It was a kind of accidental rescue.
He grew up in Ohio and outside Detroit, the oldest of four boys, in a household shaped by curiosity and unpredictability. His father moved between professions — mechanical engineer, metallurgist, even trapeze artist — while his mother managed the home. When the family’s black-and-white television broke, as it often did, Dave would watch the repairman closely, fascinated by the glowing tubes and hidden mechanisms inside. By the time he reached kindergarten, he was already building telescopes and microscopes out of Tinkertoys.
School never quite held his attention the way systems and machines did. He preferred taking things apart to memorizing lessons, and by adolescence, he was already working in a local television and radio repair shop. After graduating in 1970, with the Vietnam War looming and aware that he might be drafted, he chose to join the Navy, knowing it would offer the most advanced training in electronics. He became the sole electronics specialist aboard a P-3 Orion aircraft, where he encountered his first real onboard computer. He served for eight years, filling his time not only with technical work but with a wide range of interests: painting, music, photography and languages. At one point, while stationed in Thailand, he owned a small restaurant.
When he returned home at 27, he moved into engineering roles in both electronics and the emerging toy industry. By the early 1980s, he was working with a company connected to the Atari 2600, helping design and refine small electronic games. Subsequently, he was invited to join a think tank at Mattel, where the focus wasn’t just on toys themselves but on the future of the industry. The central question was simple but transformative: how could electronics change the way children played?
After several years, Dave stepped away from corporate life. He and his family settled deep in the Tahoe National Forest, living largely off the grid in a self-sufficient home. There, he ran a small business, taking on engineering and electronics projects for outside clients. It was a stable, satisfying life — until it suddenly wasn’t.
His son needed surgery, at a cost of nearly $100,000.
Dave didn’t have that kind of liquidity. They needed cash, and they needed it quickly.
Dave understood something most people didn’t: in the toy industry, a single hit could change everything. One successful product could generate royalties large enough to solve the problem outright. But that meant creating something exceptional — something that children wouldn’t just like, but demand.
He sat down with his wife and laid out a plan. He would dedicate the next six to eight months entirely to developing a toy. If nothing came of it, he would walk away and return to steady work. It was a gamble, but a calculated one.
And so he began.
Which is how, not long after, he found himself standing on the floor of the Toy Fair in Manhattan — alongside Caleb Chung, a former Mattel colleague he’d called in to join him. They spend five days wandering the aisles of the Javits Center, surrounded by thousands of ideas. But the toys feel increasingly interchangeable, all variations and incremental improvements, but nothing that strikes them as genuinely new.
By the final day, a sense of desperation sets in. Time is passing. Nothing has landed.
The two of them turn down a corridor and spot yet another booth. “Bandai” is written in large letters at the entrance. It’s a Japanese company.
Dave and Caleb step into the space and see that it’s dominated by a table covered in keychain-sized devices, each with a black-and-white screen. Dave picks one up and presses a button. An egg appears. Then it hatches. Inside is a tiny digital creature that needs to be fed, cleaned, and cared for.
The toy is called a Tamagotchi.
The appeal is immediate. So is the limitation.
You can care for it. You can keep it alive. But you can’t touch it.
Dave turns the device over in his hands and feels, almost immediately, what is missing. The interaction is there, but the connection isn’t. It exists only at a distance.
What if it didn’t?
What if the animal wasn’t trapped inside a screen?
What if it sat in your hand, soft, responsive and — most importantly — present.
His idea is simple, but it points towards a different way of thinking about toys.
Years earlier, while working at the Mattel thinktank, Dave had watched a young girl play with a talking doll in a test lab. The doll kept interrupting her, blurting out phrases at the wrong moments, taking over the rhythm of the game.
The girl paused. Looked at the doll. Then, calmly, she flipped it over, opened the battery compartment, and removed the batteries. She placed the doll back across from her, happy to have an innate object on which she could impose her will.
“Now we can play,” she said.
He never forgot that.
A toy should not impose itself. It should not interrupt or dominate. It should respond — just enough to suggest something is there, without ever fully taking control.
Dave and Caleb return home from the Toy Fair and get to work with a few parameters in mind: people already have dogs. And cats, for that matter. They want to create something that doesn’t exist so that people don’t have preconceived notions of what it is. Or what it should be.
But perhaps it could look a bit like an owl?
They work for a few weeks, each of them exhausted yet emboldened, pulling together an amalgamation of cables, sensors and simple circuits.
Time is their enemy, particularly if the Tamagotchi is going to debut soon in the U.S. Dave, ever the inventor, thinks that the idea for the Furby is so obvious that other people might try to invent it before them. They need to act fast.
The first iteration of the toy evolves into a creature that is semi-manually orchestrated like a puppet, and Dave presents it to an onslaught of big developers. Everyone has the same answer:
We’re interested. Fascinated. But we can’t make your timetable.
And, just when he’s most desperate, Dave receives salvation from a man named Richard Levy, a fellow toy inventor and industry veteran.
Levy’s first idea: Tiger Electronics. A humble but well-respected toy enterprise based out of a one-story office park north of Chicago, Tiger had been founded almost 20 years earlier by Roger Shiffman, Randy Rissman, and the Rissman family. The company built its reputation on handheld electronic games before scoring major hits like the Talkboy — famously featured by Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone 2 — and, more recently, the wildly popular Giga Pets.
And, so, Richard Levy offers to introduce Dave to Roger Shiffman, whom he’d known for over 20 years. Roger tells Richard and Dave that he is willing to meet. They set a meeting date. It is all going to plan.
But, then, the day before the meeting, Richard receives a phone call. Roger is deadly sick, and he is laid up in a hotel room in Los Angeles. He is going to have to cancel the meeting.
“I know you’re sick, but are you dying?” Richard questions.
“No,” Roger responds.
“Then you have to see this.”
Dave, never to be dissuaded, arrives at the hotel room of a very sick toy executive, ready to present his creation.
Once inside Roger’s suite, Dave sets the prototype down on the small table. The late afternoon light comes in through the windows in long, slanting lines, catching on the creature’s synthetic fur, which is slightly matted from being packed and unpacked all day. It sits there for a moment, still, its oversized eyes staring blankly ahead.
Across from him, Roger Shiffman — still white with sickness — watches closely.
Dave leans in, animating the small Furby prototype, coaxing out its personality through movement alone. This isn’t the finished thing — he makes that clear. The voice will come later. The interactivity, the learning, the illusion of something alive. All of that is still ahead.
What he needs now is time.
Time to turn this strange, silent creature into something people won’t be able to put down.
And Roger? He is thrilled, amazed at the possibilities for the small toy before him.
“It’s amazing,” Roger says.
“Excellent,” Dave says. He has finally found a potential buyer.
Roger arranges for his Product & Marketing Team at Tiger to see the product in August 1997. Among the team are three marketing executives — Stewart Sims, Jeffrey Jones and Marc Rosenberg — who survey the toy at the company’s modest office outside of Chicago. The group, like everyone else who sees the prototype, is amazed. A toy has never been this interactive before.
Before they leave the office, with no doubt in his voice, Jeff declares to Stewart, “If we do this, I want it.”
But, still, could they do it? Randy Rissman, Roger’s co-founder at Tiger, is not convinced that they can scale up the Furby and develop it in the timetable that was originally proposed. Is it even possible to do such a thing? Joseph Chiang, the head of engineering, tries to reassure Randy: Yes, they can.
Tiger agrees to license and develop the Furby.
And Jeff gets it — he becomes the development lead, tasked with coordinating the teams who are to work on the product. Engineers in Hong Kong are trying to make parts behave in the real world the way they do in theory. Dave takes the reins on the firmware and software inside Furby, while Caleb is contracted to deal with the mechanical side of the toy, the gears and motors that will make it tick.
The men and women behind the Furby are scattered across the world, each of them working tirelessly to ensure that the toy can be boxed and sitting on shelves by the following year.
“We were a unique team,” Jeff Jones says. “And we were close. We still are.”
What they are building has no real precedent.
Up until this point, electronic toys follow a simple logic: press a button, get a response. A predictable loop, input and output. But Furby is not supposed to feel like that. It is meant to feel alive, or at least close enough to blur the line.
It gives the impression that interaction shapes its behavior. Not through any real adaptation, but through something designed to suggest it, a kind of engineered illusion, a suspension of disbelief.
Dave Hampton leans into this idea early. He creates an invented language, blending elements of Japanese, Thai, Mandarin, Chinese, Hebrew, and English, and builds it into Furby. He calls it Furbish.
“Ay-loh-may-lah” means cloud. “Noo-lah” means friend. “Moh-moh” means monster. “Noh-lah” means dance.
Over time, Furby’s vocabulary expands to include English. It appears to learn. In reality, it is not listening or adapting. It is gradually revealing pre-programmed phrases, timed and structured to feel earned.
To a child, it feels like progress, like the toy is growing and learning alongside them. To many adults, it feels unsettling, even a little menacing. But it is all the result of Hampton’s design.
Earlier in his career, Dave had worked with a group of puppeteers, and the experience stayed with him. While developing Furby years later, he returned to an idea sparked by the group: what if the expressive movements of a sock puppet could be translated into code?
So he sets out to build a program that captures those gestures and integrates them into Furby. That decision shapes how the toy moves, giving it its signature ear motions and an uncanny, puppet-like presence, even without a visible hand behind it. Dave also develops a light sensor that allows Furbies to detect changes in their surroundings. Inspired by a rare condition known as ACHOO syndrome, he builds in a quirky response: if there’s a sudden, intense shift in light, the Furby sneezes.
Throughout the process, Dave follows one guiding principle — nothing should look dumb. That’s why Furby has no arms or legs; if it can’t realistically use them, they don’t belong.
At one point, Dave’s son offers a simple but sharp critique: “It’s dumb if a Furby can’t sense another Furby.” That insight leads to one of Furby’s most distinctive features — infrared technology, with a transmitter positioned between its eyes. When two Furbies are placed near one another, preset responses are triggered — like talking, singing together, and reacting in sync.
The source code of Furbies, as created by Dave Hampton. Source: Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/furby-source/mode/2up
Inside, the technology is doing more than most toys at the time. The processor, Jeff likes to point out, is more sophisticated than the one that helped land three men on the moon.
Technically, this is more than just a good sales line. It’s true. And also, somehow, beside the point. Because what matters isn’t what it can do. It's what it feels like it might be able to do.
That feeling comes from small things: The timing of an eyelid blink. The slight delay before it responds. The way its ears move — not randomly, but not perfectly in sync either. Just enough irregularity to suggest intention.
People don’t experience it as a system. They experience it as something closer to a presence. And that makes it harder to categorize.
Harder, in some cases, to trust.
Toymaking is a cutthroat business.
Caleb leaves the team just before Thanksgiving 1997, when, according to people who worked on Furby, he fails to deliver the mechanics he had promised for the toy’s prototypes.
Dave is left to, quite literally, pick up the pieces. At Richard Levy’s behest, the team at Tiger hires Richard Maddocks, another engineer, to help Dave make their deadline.
By February of 1998, Furby is nearly ready for the world.
The night before Toy Fair — almost one year to the day since they first conceived the idea — Dave is ready.
That night, the team at Tiger Electronics is told to report to a meeting room of the Marriott hotel where they are staying. They file into the room around 11 p.m. — developers, marketers, executives — everyone slightly disoriented, fretting about the next morning, the presentation, the pressure of showing something that, until recently, barely worked.
Roger Shiffman, the founder of Tiger, stands at the front.
“I have some news,” he says with gravitas. “Tiger Electronics has been acquired. By Hasbro.”
The room rustles.
There isn’t time to process it. There isn’t time for questions. Because the next part comes immediately: They will be leading a private showing of Furby for Hasbro leadership.
The very next morning.
It’s time to prove their new invention.
The showroom at Toy Fair is ready. The original prototype is working. It’s been tested. It’s stable. Jeff and Dave place Furby on its pedestal, positioned under bright overhead lights. And just before the demonstration begins, it freezes.
They pull it away and into a back room, closing the door behind them. The noise of the showroom dulls instantly.
“It was working,” Jeff says, frustratedly.
Nothing obvious is wrong. The wiring is intact. The components are functioning.
Then Dave and Jeff look up.
“The lights.”
The showroom lighting is different from anything they had tested under. And, as it turns out, the halogen lights are interfering with the signals controlling the motor in the Furby
They don’t have time for a real fix. So they frantically wrap their prized possession’s wire with tinfoil, bring it back out to the showroom, and are relieved to find that the circuits now work.
They put it back together. Set it upright. And wait. For a second, nothing happens.
Then the eyes blink. A small sound. Movement.
They don’t say anything. They just pick it up and run it back out to find that Hasbro executives are already there.
Alan Hassenfeld. Senior leadership. People who had seen every toy imaginable. Jeff places the Furby on the pedestal.
It blinks. It moves. It speaks.
That is enough.
Hassenfeld opens his mouth to speak. A collective intake of breath. “This is the coolest thing I’ve seen in my 25 years of business.”
A ripple of relieved laughter passes through the group. Dave and Jeff glance excitedly around the room. It seems that they really have done it.
Randy Rissman, the co-founder of Tiger, declares to Alan, “This is your bonus for buying the company.”
Almost needless to say, the Furby goes on to be a huge success at Toy Fair. Every customer is enamoured with the tiny little ball of fur.
“How does it feel,” a product manager asks Jeff later, on the drive back to the airport, “to have the hit of Toy Fair?”
“It’s great,” he says. “Except we haven’t sold any.”
That will change. Quickly.
At FAO Schwarz on Fifth Avenue in Manhattan, the launch feels less like a product release and more like a spectacle. A white limousine pulls up outside the store. Children step out, each holding a pillow. Resting on top are the toys themselves, their wide eyes blinking, their ears twitching slightly as they are carried inside.
The night before, Marc Rosenberg and the rest of the team rushed to get everything up and running. This is their big moment, and Marc is at the helm. Lana Simon, the smiling head of public relations for Tiger, runs over to Marc.
“Marc,” she says, almost out of breath. “It would seem that the little person we hired to be in the life-sized Furby costume is too short. They won’t be able to reach the eyes to make them blink on the costume.”
Marc looks at her incredulously, “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me. The little person is too short?”
They find someone else to wear the costume. And they sell 2,500 Furbies in the first four minutes.
The FAO Schwarz launch is the first of many that puts Furby on front pages, on TV screens, on billboards and in magazines. Pretty much anywhere a U.S. consumer looks, a Furby advertisement is there. McDonald's even starts including McFurbys in Happy Meals.
A Mary Beth’s Magazine featuring the Furby McDonald's collection. Source: Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/mary-beth-mcdonalds-furby
Richard Levy says of Marc and Lana, “They could accomplish more with one arm tied behind their respective backs than many larger toy companies do with large departments supported by outside agencies.”
The production of the toy happens so quickly that they have to create TV commercials before they even have a working prototype of a Furby. They place a piece of fabric over a plastic shell meant to resemble the small toy, and marketing executives cue child actors on how to react to the fake Furby.
They open with a jingle playing in the background while a Furby opens and closes its eyes and speaks in its Furbish tongue. Cut to two kiddos holding up their Furby, pressing their faces against the soft fur. Then, that familiar ‘90s commercial ending: “Furby. Each sold separately. Batteries not included.”
It’s simple, but it doesn’t matter. Everyone immediately wants one.
Features of Furby’s website from 2001. Source: Internet Archive. https://web.archive.org/web/20011005023123/http://216.167.81.131/main.asp
Crowds gather. Cameras follow. The creatures chirp and respond in real time, each one slightly different from the next.
They sneeze at sudden light. They react to touch. They speak in their own language. Within weeks, demand exceeds supply. Within months, it overwhelms it.
“The endangered species of this year’s holiday shopping season,” the Today Show declares.
“These guys will have their own conversation without us,” Marc Rosenberg says on the show, crouching on a semi-circular couch with Katie Couric while she looks on intently.
Couric responds smilingly, “Can you get them to shut up?”
Katie Couric surveying a Furby on the Today Show. Source: https://www.today.com/video/today-flashback-remember-furby-366591043593
Wired Magazine calls it “the hottest toy” of the 1998 holiday season.
The New York Times concurs. As does The Washington Post, which writes, “Even though Halloween costumes are still on the shelves, parents and toy retailers together already are trying to call the hot toy of the season. Furby is an early frontrunner.”
The Deseret News quotes Mark O’Hanian, a district manager for K-B Toys, saying, “As soon as this hit, it was red hot.”
Another broadcast: “Tiger Electronics builds Furby as the closest thing around to an actual living creature.”
All of the hype feeds the frenzy. The old adage holds: all press is good press.
The product becomes almost impossible to find. Even Dave Hampton, who is promised samples of his own invention, cannot get his hands on a Furby. They move too fast off the shelves.
Dave Hampton on CNN in Oct. 1998. Source: https://www.cnn.com/videos/business/2023/06/23/furby-first-release-1998-and-revival-jg-orig.cnn
“Finding a Furby on store shelves these days is like looking for a needle in the haystack,” one broadcaster says. Another holds up a folded newspaper, “In this ad, someone is selling a rare, white, blue-eyed Furby for 500 bucks…Tiger Electronics says there are no rare ones, so there’s no real reason for that price.”
And in Washington — during President Bill Clinton’s impeachment hearing, no less — Representative Mary Bono quips, “The economy is strong, the stock market is great, although some of us still can't get Furbys — so it's not strong enough.”
Economic times might be tough for the country, but, thanks to Furby, Tiger Electronics is thriving.
This is their lightning-in-a-bottle moment: a rare convergence of the right inventor, Dave Hampton, and executives and engineers — like Jeff Jones, Richard Levy, Stewart Sims, Randy Rissman, Alan Hassenfeld, Alfred Verrecchia, Roger Shiffman, Marc Rosenberg, Lana Simon, and Joseph Chiang, and Richard Maddocks — willing to work around the clock to bring it to life.
Dave Hampton is in his home off the grid in the Tahoe National Forest when Furby-mania explodes. He can’t help but to be proud of himself, in awe of what’s been accomplished. And, he realizes, the financial reward means that he can now pay for the surgery that his son so desperately needs.
As Furby-mania takes hold, customers begin to compare notes. What did yours say? What has it seemed to learn? What does it remember? Lars Norpchen and Jenny Sparks watch as the emails continue to roll in on the Furby Autopsy website and the stories they’re receiving paint a vivid picture.
Across the United States, Furbies in closets and drawers seem to be coming alive. Sometimes in the middle of the night. Sometimes in tones very different from the normal high-pitched voice. Low, menacing tones are reported. What does that mean? Could it be responding to something? Could it really see something that was not there?
One child reports waking up to a knock on the bedroom door, only to find their Furby just outside, on the threshold, its ears wiggling in the moonlight, its mouth opening and closing, as though provoking them.
A student goes to class one day with a Furby stashed safely in their backpack, batteries removed so that it won’t be disruptive. But, in the midst of a math test, something interrupts.
“Cockadoodledoo, me love you!”
The class erupts in laughter. The student is embarrassed.
How was this possible? There were no batteries in the toy!
In Waldorf, Maryland, a packaged Furby is mistaken for a bomb when a woman finds a parcel with an unrecognized return address humming and buzzing. Petrified, she scampers back into her house and calls the local sheriff’s department. But the sheriff, too, is afraid. So he calls the bomb squad.
When they arrive, in their haz-matted regalia and ceremoniously open the package, the six-inch Furby exclaims, “Ay-wah!”
The haz-mat team looks down at the small furry creature, its eyes opening and closing, its ears wiggling.
How is it that a simple $35 toy could be mistaken for an explosive?
Or, as Mary Ann and Steven Martin experience, something debaucherous.
The proud grandparents bought a Furby for their 1-year-old grandson at a Walmart in Columbia, S.C., only to hear it say something that stopped them in their tracks.
It couldn’t be. Could it?
The way Mary Ann and Steven heard it, it was not “hug me” that the Furby had muttered, but a vulgar sexual come-on that rhymes with it.
What in the world?
They report to ABC News that they are certain that the creatures are emitting curse words.
And the Martins are not alone. About three dozen Furbies say the phrase that sounds like “hug me” before one Walmart in Pennsylvania pulls some of its Furbies off the shelves.
It seems like a public relations nightmare is looming.
The New York Post decries, “Foul-mouthed Furbys Pulled Off the Shelves.”
The headlines take off as quickly as the Furby craze.
“Cute, yet vaguely menacing.”
“A slightly sinister-looking animatronic pet.”
But, actually, the hysteria is about to get way, way worse.
A Furby trainer’s guide from 1999. Source: Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/furbytrainersgui00arno/mode/2up
Outside of the National Security Agency headquarters, CBS News correspondent Bob Orr gets ready for a live shot.
“In terms of sheer numbers, Furbies present a significant force…”
“But,” Orr states as Furby regalia gives way to footage of government buildings. “You won’t find a single Furby here at the National Security Agency.”
The CBS Evening News report on Furby hysteria from Jan. 18, 1999. Source: CBS News.
Just weeks before Christmas 1998, as Furbies are infiltrating the homes of millions of Americans, someone posts a warning on the agency’s internal intranet.
“Hi there, it has come to my attention that a new toy on the market has an Artificial Intelligence chip on board. An office I recently visited had two of these in their spaces. Apparently, these stuffed critters learn from nearby speech patterns. It would seem to me that this might be a security issue in that they can pick up any spoken language and repeat it. I believe these things are called “Fropie’s” but I’m not sure. But my understanding is that these guys contain a writable chip… That would definitely be a security concern. Please help clear this up… Thanks.”
The agency follows up quickly with a directive. A “FURBIE ALERT” goes out to employees.
“Personally owned photographic, video, and audio recording equipment are prohibited items. This includes toys, such as ‘Furbies’ with built-in records that repeat the audio with synthesized sound to mimic the original audio signal. Please do not introduce these into NSA Spaces.”
What isn’t said is that the NSA believes this is more than just a mystifying creation. No. The NSA seems to be accusing Furby of being a spy, capable of eavesdropping on sensitive conversations in the halls of America’s most top-secret agencies.
The memo is leaked in early January 1999. Former NSA general counsel Stewart Baker speculates in The Washington Post that “getting them [the Furbys] out is going to be almost harder than getting them in.”
Internally, the message boards are lighting up. One commenter asks:
“The big curiosity is what medium a Furby uses to record audio. I would assume that since it can ‘respond’ to certain audio cues that it would use storage similar to a digital answering machine or straight computer memory chips. Anybody know?”
Another:
“Well, hopefully the hairy intruders have been properly handled and removed from Agency spaces. We surely want to avoid the situation turning into a FURBYGATE. ;)”
And another:
“Most speech processing records some audio samples long enough to produce > statistics. Does the furbie flush these buffers? How much information is in a sample? We could launch a study to find out, but asking people to leave them at home sounds easier.”
Two hundred miles away, the Furby hysteria is spreading, spawning like a virus. The Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth, Virginia, instructs any and all security personnel to seize any Furbies brought onto the compound immediately upon sight and to question the owners who brought them there.
On NBC, correspondent Brigitte Quinn declares: “The security scare involving the Furby doll is spreading. The Pentagon already considers Furby a security threat. The toy which can record and repeat what it hears is not allowed in classified areas.”
The New York Times calls it, “The Furby: Hot Toy Turned Electro-Menace.”
The chaos travels to 30,000 feet. When planes push back from airport gates across America, flight attendants add something to the safety checklist: “Please remove the batteries from your Furbies during this time.”
Passengers share an incredulous look. We need to power down our Furbies?
Yes, indeed, they do. The FAA has just banned Furby’s use during takeoff and landing for worry they could interfere with the plane’s instruments.
Hospitals are worried too. In Glasgow, Scotland, staff at the Royal Hospital for Sick Children pry the fuzzy animals from the arms of wanting children in its intensive care unit. And in Calgary, Canada, at Alberta Children's Hospital, personnel also remove Furbies’ batteries, fearful that the small toys could interfere with medical equipment.
In an era of rapidly advancing technology — technology that is not quite understood — people around the world begin to wonder: Is someone quietly infiltrating our world through this tiny doll?
Or is it all just the result of a Red Scare-type hysteria at a time when technology threatens to surpass human intelligence?
Bob Orr finishes up his liveshot. The broadcast goes out over the airwaves.
Back in California, no one from the NSA contacts Dave. No calls come from the Pentagon. Or from the hospitals overseas. No one thinks to ask him whether or not his invention is actually capable of doing all of the things that are reported in the press — or by the top levels of the American government.
But to find the answers, you only need to look inside — to the one, singular motor that Dave had constructed with his own two hands and the knowledge that he gained from taking apart his parents’ television set and putting it back together.
Open up the Furby — just like Jenny Sparks and Lars Norpchen did — and you’ll find it: a system of sensors, pre-programmed responses, and timing that makes it feel less predictable than it really is. What seems like learning is an illusion. What seems like awareness is design.
Furby could not listen. It could not record. It could only react — in the way that Dave had designed.
The reasons were simple: the Furby could come back to life after its batteries were taken out due to residual energy stored in its capacitors. It could speak more English over time because Dave had programmed it to do just that. It could sense other Furbies because of its infrared technology. It could sneeze, not because of dust, but because of Dave’s inspiration from a rare disease.
All of it made sense. It was science.
You might think that Dave would be disappointed that his invention was being extrapolated upon — lied about, even.
Or perhaps a bit frustrated to see everything fall so out of his hands. After all, he had just created a toy.
But, no. Dave is thrilled.
Some of the smartest technological minds in the country — in the world — believe that his invention is capable of near-superhuman actions. Emulating speech, movement, and real, human thought. Listening in, and reacting.
He has done exactly what he set out to do.
In the original contract that he signed with Tiger, Dave put in a clause that a certain amount had to be spent by the company on marketing his great invention. His next big toy.
Marc Rosenberg, the savvy marketing mind, approaches Dave to ask, “So, do we still have to spend all that money on marketing?”
Dave smiles knowingly, thinking of the CBS Evening News report, of the New York Times headlines, and the report on NBC. He responds, “No, we most certainly do not.”
Sales are so strong that Randy Rissman calls Richard Levy to say Tiger is going to take their ads off TV so as not to overdrive the product.
What might have been considered a PR nightmare — the government accusing a six-inch toy of espionage — was actually working to boost sales, encouraging wannabe Furby buyers to swipe their credit cards or hand over their $35 cash and try it for themselves.
If everyone’s being spied on, why not you, too?
And in Chicago, a collective whoop of laughter could be heard from the Tiger offices, where employees are endlessly bemused by the onslaught of coverage on their product. They watch as the rumors make it to the most important news program in the nation — the pulse of the people, the official record for the zeitgeist.
In an interview on the CBS Evening News, Roger Shiffman explains the ridiculousness of the accusations to a national audience by stating, “Furby has absolutely no ability to record anything whatsoever. Never has.”
He continues, “I’ve been told that we’re developing a Furby that can drive a car in the year 2000. We’ve also been told that the current Furby has the technology to launch the space shuttle. We have one woman who is absolutely insistent that her Furby sings Italian operas.”
The Tiger employees keep on laughing. They laugh all the way to the bank, in fact.
And at the end of the broadcast, when Bob Orr poses a question: “But none of that is true, is it?” they answer his question to anyone who will listen: “Of course not.”
But it sure makes for a hell of a story.
Years later, Dave happens to meet a former NSA agent at a gathering of computer and technology specialists in Northern California.
“Dave Hampton," the former agent says. “I’m the one who instituted the Furby ban at the NSA.”
Dave holds out his glass to cheers the man before him. “Thanks for the free advertising,” he says.
The Furby didn’t create anxiety. It revealed it.
It sat in kitchens and bedrooms and living rooms, blinking, listening, responding just enough to suggest awareness. And once something suggests life, people begin to treat it that way. They project onto it. They test it. They worry about it. They imagine what it might be capable of.
To understand why, you have to look at the moment it arrived. The internet was beginning to reshape everything at once: how people worked, how they communicated, how they understood the world. Microsoft was on trial. Linux had just been released. The iMac arrived as a symbol of a new kind of computing. Technology was no longer something on the horizon. It was already here, already changing the rules.
At the same time, the world itself felt unstable. Wars unfolded on television screens in real time. Terrorist attacks, plane crashes, and global conflicts were no longer distant — they were immediate, visible, constant. At home, the headlines were no less unsettling: impeachment hearings, domestic terrorism cases, hate crimes, a growing sense that institutions were under strain. And hanging over all of it was Y2K — the widely shared belief that the very systems now running the world might suddenly fail.
It was an atmosphere defined by uncertainty. By the sense that things were changing faster than anyone could fully understand.
And into that environment came a small, six-inch creature that blinked, spoke, reacted, and seemed, at least sometimes, to do things on its own.
People didn’t just see a toy. They saw their fears reflected back at them.
Looking back, it’s easy to say that people overreacted. That it was hysteria, or misunderstanding, or a case of imagination getting ahead of reality. And in a technical sense, that’s true. The Furby wasn’t listening. It wasn’t learning. It wasn’t thinking anything at all.
But that explanation doesn’t fully account for what people were responding to. Because the reaction wasn’t just about what the Furby was. It was about what it felt like.
The sense that something might be there. Not fully alive, not fully understood, but close enough that the distinction began to blur.
That feeling, it turns out, wasn’t a mistake. It was just 25 years too early.
Because today, we live with that same experience, just more fully realized. We talk to things that respond in real time. We ask questions and receive responses that feel considered, specific, even personal. The interaction no longer depends on illusion alone. The systems are more capable now, sure, but the feeling they produce — the sense that something is there, responding to us — hasn’t changed. If anything, it’s become easier to accept. And increasingly difficult to distinguish these systems from the people using them.
Which makes the original moment harder to dismiss. The concern was never really about what the Furby could do. It was about how quickly people were willing to believe it could do more nd how natural that belief felt once the interaction crossed a certain threshold.
Because once something behaves like it might be alive, we stop evaluating it as a machine. We start relating to it as something else. And that shift doesn’t happen in the technology. It happens in us.
In 1998, that shift was projected onto a toy. A harmless object, shaped by timing and circumstance into something more than it really was. We let our imaginations run ahead of the facts, imbuing a six-inch, thirty-dollar object with all the capabilities we feared were already emerging around us.
But the conditions that made that possible were never unique to Furby. They were the result of a world in transition — of rapid technological change colliding with uncertainty, fear, and incomplete understanding.
Those conditions haven’t disappeared. If anything, they’ve intensified.
The world is still unstable. The technology is more advanced. The systems are more opaque. And the line between what is real and what only feels real is harder to draw than it has ever been.
The Furby didn’t cross that line. It only pointed toward it.
Now, we’re living on the other side of it.
Luckily, most of us still have our Furbys packed away somewhere. In the corner of a dark basement, at the bottom of a plastic tub filled with the remnants of our childhood. It’s been sitting there for decades, waiting.
Maybe it’s time to dust it off. See if it has any advice for us.
After all, some people still believe that it’s always been listening.
Mimi Lamarre is a New York-based journalist and writer. She works for CBS News, and is a graduate of Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism and the University of Virginia.
This is Abo Elementary School, in Artesia, New Mexico. It’s also a nuclear shelter.
I remember seeing black and yellow fallout shelter signs in my own public school buildings growing up in the 2000’s and early 2010’s. Generally, the shelters these referred to were a concrete room in a larger building that had long since been converted to generic storage, particularly after federal civil defense funding dried up in the 1970s.1
Abo took things a little bit more seriously than most schools. The building in this picture is not Abo Elementary School. This is just the entrance to the school: the school itself is hidden underground to protect it against fallout or a nuclear blast wave. The concrete roof also served as a basketball court. According to a Time magazine article about the school,2 Abo Elementary included two wells for emergency drinking water (and for air conditioning in normal circumstances), 14 days of food supply, underground phone lines and radio equipment, provisions for fire fighting and garbage disposal, and even a morgue. Wikipedia adds air-filtration systems, an emergency power-generation system, and decontamination systems to the list, sourced from a 2001 book on fallout shelters in general.
Abo had its design by 1960; construction completed in 1962. It was designed for 540 students, and had capacity for over 2,000 residents in case of an emergency. The town’s population was over six times bigger – nearly 12,000 residents – and some students at the school later expressed being afraid that their parents wouldn’t be able to make it to the shelter in the event of a real nuclear attack. But the builders of the school wanted to reassure kids, not scare them. The Time article quotes the then-president of Artesia’s Board of Education, Mrs. C. P. Bunch:
“These shelters have an important psychological value,” says Mrs. Bunch. “We must build up the will to resist. America’s morale will go down if we feel helpless. Let’s teach our children that we can protect ourselves and survive.”
Abo was used until 1995, when it was replaced with a school next door (Yeso Elementary), though the building still stands.
New Mexico has a long history with nuclear weapons, hosting both the main research site and the first nuclear detonation of the Manhattan project, but that state was not unique in focusing on civil defense in the 60’s. The US as a whole was kind of obsessed with it for a while. The nuclear threat never disappeared, of course, but these days other potential disasters are seared into the public consciousness. (Lockdown drills, anyone?)
Despite how we make fun of civil defense in the 50s and 60s (and it definitely had its absurd moments), there actually is a point to being prepared for a nuclear or radiation emergency still today. It may be impossible for a person to survive at the center of an atomic fireball, or for civilization to quickly recover from a full-scale nuclear exchange. But there are still places where lives could be saved from nuclear and radioactive hazards: at the outer edge of a limited atomic strike, or in range of a terrorist’s “dirty bomb”, or near a nuclear power disaster. The aging survivors of the attacks Hiroshima and Nagasaki can attest that it is possible to recover, as horrific as this situation would be.
The current best advice is to shelter inside any building as soon as possible – ideally in a basement or the middle floors of a tall building, since radioactive dust settles on the roof and the ground level. Of course, the true best advice is to work on keeping the world peaceful enough that we never need to use our emergency preparations. But living in the world we do today, I really can’t blame the people of Artesia for wanting a backup plan.
Coming soon: A Tale of Two Hyderabads
OpenAI demonstrated their Sora video generator on February 15th, 2024. People freaked out.
March 26th, 2026 from the New York Times.
Oops. The video revolution will apparently not be AI generated.
To illustrate what is happening here I want to talk about this 8-track from 1977, Dumb Ditties.
In 1977 I was seven years old, and for a period of time Dumb Ditties was my favorite album. Produced by the K-Tel corporation, Dumb Ditties is a collection of novelty songs like “Monster Mash,” or one of my favorite,s “On Top of Spaghetti,” a song that I’m pretty confident I could sing every lyric to:
On top of spaghetti,
All covered with cheese,
I lost my poor meatball,
When somebody sneezed.
…and so on.
But my favorite song was the one song by a non-novelty artist, Chuck Berry’s “My Ding-a-ling” which is taken from a live performance with a sing-along/call-and-response section where the entire crowd shouts the chorus:
My ding-a-ling, my ding-a-ling
I want you to play with my ding-a-ling
My ding-a-ling, my ding-a-ling
I want you to play with my ding-a-ling
If I have to explain whey a seven-year-old boy would experience a little thrill over being able to march around the house singing a one-and-a-half entendre joke about his privates, you’ve never met a seven-year-old boy.
“My Ding-a-ling” is someone else’s song, and the recording on Dumb Ditties is from the early 70’s, well after Chuck Berry’s heyday as one of the chief progenitors of rock and roll and when he apparently had to resort to novelty song sing-alongs to get the audience going.
I don’t recall listening to “My Ding-a-ling” in the years between 1977 and today as I started writing this newsletter. Pretty quickly my taste in novelty songs moved on to AC/DC’s “Big Balls” from the album Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap, which has an opening verse and chorus that goes like this:
Well, I'm upper, upper-class, high-society
God's gift to ballroom notoriety
And I always fill my ballroom, the event is never small
The social pages say I've got the biggest balls of all
[Chorus]
I've got big balls, I've got big balls
They're such big balls, and they're dirty big balls
And he's got big balls and she's got big balls
But we've got the biggest balls of them all
Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! Classic! He’s talking about like, you know, dancing in a ballroom, but it’s really about his balls! You know…his balls! (His testicles.) What a legend!
In fifth grade, I thought this ruled, but it is not the part of the AC/DC catalog I return to today.
It is not hard to identify a novelty song in that the only reason you listen to them is for the novelty of the joke, and once you hear the joke a few times, the novelty wears off unless that song is “On Top of Spaghetti” and you sing it just to annoy the people around you, which come to think of it, wears off too. These songs are not good in any sense of the word. Within a few years of Dumb Ditties, “Weird Al” Yankovic would hit on a superior formula, by yoking the novelty to good pop songs you want to hear, but even then the enduring appeal is limited.
I think, pretty much since ChatGPT became widely available (November 30, 2022), we’ve been in repeated novelty cycle when it comes to generative AI applications where we are initially captured and intrigued, only to have some measure of the novelty wear off, leaving disillusionment in its wake.
The saga of Sora is a perfect example, an application that was going to upend all of filmmaking turning into a dead commercial enterprise in just over two years. But this is far from the only example. In fact, I think you can look at almost the entirety of the public discourse around the capacities of this technology as a repeating novelty cycle.
For something to be a novelty, it must simultaneously surprise, and either entertain or upset a status quo. “My Ding-a-ling” is compelling because it authorizes young children to express something nominally dirty without getting in trouble. (At least in my household. Kudos to Mom and Dad knowing what battles to fight, as banning '‘My Ding-a-ling” would have only prolonged my interest.)
Sora threatened to upend all of the television and movie industries, but in reality, making short videos from prompts is, at best, a novelty. OpenAI tried to squeeze some additional juice by striking a $1 billion deal to license Disney characters to the platform, but I think nails it when he likens Sora to “MadLibs,” a fun game to play with your friends like once a year at best.
What is going on that we so readily and serially mistake novelty for something that’s meaningful, transformative, and enduring?
This very famous early response to the appearance of ChatGPT falls into the novelty trap:
Personally, I was not all that astounded by what ChatGPT could produce (and said so), because the thing the author above is reacting to - near instantaneous surface-level competent five-paragraph essays on academic subjects - is something that I, personally, put no stock in. They did not have value when done by students and so they also don’t have value when they are done by large language models.
Sora appeared to have value when demonstrated in short clips because people were willing, perhaps even eager to extrapolate from 30 seconds of video to extended video narratives on TV and film. But, as it turns out, to make a satisfactory - never mind good - full-length narrative video you need all kinds of capacities that are beyond an AI video generator.
I cannot emphasize enough that all of this was known at the time of Sora’s arrival and yet the coverage was nonetheless breathless. That students should be doing work other cranking out formulaic five-paragraph essays was also a known-known, and yet there we were, hyperventilating over something that wasn’t worth a human’s time anyway.
Am I getting a little frustrated here? Maybe. Three and a half years later and we still can’t manage to hunker down and treat this technology seriously, rather than lurching after novelty. Ethan Mollick, one of our leading experts on generative AI, a guy who will cost your organization six-figures to come opine about this stuff, essentially tests these models with a deliberate novelty, asking them to create a video of “an otter using a laptop on an airplane.” You can see how much better models have gotten at rendering this stuff over the last couple of years, and it’s impressive.
But so what! Who gives a shit? For much less than six-figures I will gladly come to your organization to discuss how if we’re going to manage ourselves in a world with AI technology we cannot take these wild swings based on responses to novelty.
How many of these benchmarks are actually tied to something meaningful in the world? I don’t think the otter on a plane makes the cut.
I have started to collect examples of people falling out of fascination with the novelty and I’ve particularly enjoyed the journey of the writer John Ganz over the last six weeks or so. Ganz is the author of When the Clock Broke: Con Men, Conspiracists, and How America Cracked Up in the Early 1990s, and the newsletter. Ganz is a great example of the virtue of “unique intelligences” that I mulled over a couple weeks ago.
It is a pleasure to see Ganz’s mind at work because it is a mind that is undeniably alive and it is Ganz’s willingness to speak and write his mind that is (in my view) the chief source of his success. So, I was a little surprised when he used Claude Code to “vibe code” something he called “Polybius” an automated program meant to measure the “Authoritarian Consolidation Index” a measure of how close a particular society is to authoritarian rule.
I probably shouldn’t have been surprised because Ganz is obviously a curious person who - like me - had been hearing a lot about Claude Code and autonomous agents, but unlike me had a potentially interesting idea about what he might code.
To be honest, I never bothered looking at Polybius because it had the whiff of novelty to me - as any vibe coded app should - so I was interested to hear Ganz’s remarks in his most recent weekly conversation with :
“I’m back to bearish on AI…I gotta tell you. I’ve been using Claude and I did build something out of it…I don’t think what I built, and maybe this says more about me than it, but I don’t think what I built it working anymore. It’s kind of a piece of garbage, to be honest with you.”
Ganz goes on to say how it requires a lot of work to make it work, time he hasn’t had and if you check out his tone from the conversation with Max Reed you can sense some understandable exasperation. This thing was supposed to be a kind of miracle, but it just isn’t.
Ganz literally says, “I honestly have gotten back to the point where I’d gotten from this is a miracle machine to this is stupid.”
Fortunately, Ganz has all the pre-existing capacities and knowledge (what I call a practice) to understand the limits of what he’s built and the technology in general. He knows the work he wants to do and that the tool is not necessarily well-suited to it. This is the kind of mind we should be inculcating in students, a mind that is resistant to novelty passing for meaning.
I have had people who are enthusiastic about these tools reach out to me and show me things they’ve done that seem amazing, but which, from my perspective, are clearly novelties. I previously linked to a neat piece by where he vibe coded a program to create a “power ranking” of writers since 1965.
It’s neat! But also, so what? What do we do with this? What, if anything, can be extended from this new knowledge? Perhaps something, but the discovery of that something requires us to move past novelty. Maybe Claude Code or autonomous agents are going to change the digital humanities forever, though I maintain that the chief skill of a good digital humanist will remain being able to formulate an interesting question from which an answer makes us want to ask and answer more questions.
I think the most significant, self-inflicted problem institutions and organizations are facing - particularly educational ones - is being seduced by novelty and mistaking novelty for something enduringly meaningful.
On BlueSky I worked through a bit of a thread responding to the announcement that the Canvas learning management system would incorporate AI as a “teaching agent.”
That screenshot gives you the nut of where I stand, but further down I note the use that Canvas envisions, using the AI to make grading rubrics for you. The problem is that student-facing rubrics are themselves a kind of novelty - a persistent one, but a novelty nonetheless - that is poorly aligned with the kinds of experiences and assessments that help students become competent and confident writers.
The agentic AI is adding novelty on top of novelty.
The challenge here is to know novelty when you see it. When it comes to a novelty song all you need is your inherent humanity which rather quickly grows bored of the merely novel. A lot of the music I listened to as a kid proved to be more novelty than enduring. I once could not get enough of Ted Nugent screaming “Anyone who wants to get mellow can get the fuck out of here!” before kicking into “Wang Tang Sweet Poontang” on his Double Live Gonzo album, though truth be told, I did not even understand the reference at the time I would’ve professed myself a fan of “the Nuge.” I don’t listen to Ted Nugent anymore because his music just kind of sucks.
There is other music from that 8-Track era that I do still listen to, such as Marvin Gaye Live at the London Palladium, an album my dad played relentlessly in the Oldsmobile Visa Cruiser Wagon, that I might’ve even complained about at the time, but which is for sure no novelty.
Chuck Berry is appropriately remembered for his contributions to rock and roll, not his novelty song. Ted Nugent is remembered as a guy who shoots things with crossbows and soon enough he will not be remembered at all. There are precisely zero Sora videos that have entered the public consciousness, making it less successful than Dumb Ditties, which at least has “On Top of Spaghetti.” I’m confident Polybius is the least interesting thing John Ganz will make.
Whenever the next amazing AI thing shows up, remember to ask yourself whether or not it’s a novelty and the answer is probably yes.
(Where do you see novelties in the AI world?)
Links
This week at the Chicago Tribune I offered my take on Tana French’s conclusion to the Ardnakelty trilogy, The Keeper.
At Inside Higher Ed I published a very excellent guest post from Julia Morgan McKenzie “In Defense of Long Writing.”
At I published a Q&A with Tim Cain about a new report that collects the specific language on academic freedom in collective bargaining agreements. A great resource for labor work in higher education.
cannot shut up about these books. Nor should she!
Nobody understands or utilizes this platform to better effect than who taught me a new genre of writing, “effort posting,” while also confirming that I will never effort post.
I notice that South Carolina indie publisher Hub City got a very nice shoutout in this profile of the writer Nancy Lemann who is having her earlier work republished in a big way.
Via my friends and in honor of baseball’s opening day, a classic from the archives, “Casey ‘At the Bat’ Responds to that Mean Poem about Him,” by Jeremiah Budin.
Recommendations
1. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
2. The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern
3. A Manual For Cleaning Women by Lucia Berlin
4. James by Percival Everett
5. Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell
Lesley S. - Marina, CA
For Lesley I’m going with a book that’s a little shaggy in terms of structure and execution, but which I thought gets so much right in its close attention to its characters that it completely won me over, Wayward by Dana Spiotta.
As I was working on this edition UPS delivered a custom package containing Marlon James’ forthcoming novel, The Disappearers featuring the cover image embossed into the cardboard.
It was so nice that I wanted to disassemble and frame the cardboard. I felt sort of excited that a press can still go an extra mile or two for a book like this. It doesn’t publish until September, so I won’t be reading it until this summer, but it looks great.
I’ll see you all again next week.
JW
The Biblioracle
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