Calvin Laughlin | CS470 Winter 2024
Preventative measures can only take us so far. If we want to ensure that we can escape from the Turing Trap, we will need to eventually start to fight AI in something we can totally still win at: hand to hand combat. For this assignment, I created a beat-boxing imitation game. Not the one where you try to distinguish human from machine, but instead one where you try to fight for your humanity by replicating the commands given to you by the computer. The user wears boxing gloves with phones running GyrOSC, sent to ChucK then to Wekinator, to pick up on boxing gestures. There are 6 total gestures: punch, block, and uppercut, for both left and right.
This project feels like the culmination of my experience throughout CS470. I don’t really know what I expected coming into this course, but I definitely didn’t expect to be making a boxing training video in which I am preparing to survive the takeover of AI through combat. This project went through a lot of phases, and each iteration I found myself appling techniques and principles learned from the class. I started with just the sound effect, but then transitioned into a sort of boxing tempo controller, where each swing played one note from the Rocky theme song. That felt a bit rigid and unexpressive, though, so I soon switched to the idea of “beat-boxing,” where each swing represents some sort of percussive instrument. And to tie it all together, with Alan Turing as inspiration, I wanted it to be some sort of “imitation game” in which the user and the computer are in conversation with one another.
So what of Music and AI? Well, I can say one thing for certain: I had a lot of fun, fun I would not have had without artificial intelligence. It’s an easy technology to demonize because it’s so new, and because it does have scary unknown consequences. And often the unknown is even scarier than the known. But by playing with it, I feel I was able to create more positive knowns to myself than I had before. Playing with it shows the positive impact that AI can have in the world if it is used in a way that inspires joy rather than weaponizing it for profit. So while I can’t control what others do with this tech, I can control what I do with it, and what I want to do with it is throw my computer in the air and have it giggle on the way down. At least then I can tell myself that I’m not part of the problem. Hopefully that's part of the solution.
I decided to go with neither of my ideas from the brainstorm and instead to go with something that felt more like myself. Instead of a cardboard box, I have settled on AI-powered boxing gloves that transmit gyroscope OSC data from my phone to Wekinator to make punching noises. I figure that if we're going to start having to worry about AI trying to kill us, we might as well start learning how to defend ourselves. But one thing is for sure, I would love for AI to try to step to me, cause if it does it's gonna catch these hands. For the rest of the project, I plan on adding more sounds to the punching toolkit, adding visuals to go with the punches (like the classic Batman "Pow!" and "Bam!"), as well as test this in the field with a bluetooth speaker taped to my chest.