Having built some tools to assist with using my VR headset last year, I decided to have another go at another “lockdown challenge”. Artificial Intelligence is increasingly becoming part of our lives and with it comes risks and benefits, but for me to really understand it I wanted to make one.

From my earlier attempt last year, I knew of GPT-2 from OpenAI which came with instructions to build it locally. I have recently got my internet connection speed fixed and was keen to give it is a try (knowing that the downloads could be quite sizeable).

Following the documentation carefully I installed the tools on my laptop. There was a choice of being able to allow GPT-2 to create text from scratch, or to seed it with some text. It is that second option that I found much more exciting and gave it a few lines of Shakespeare I remembered from school. I wish I had kept the results of that first test – GPT-2 took what I gave it and wrote the further text of a style and nature that the bard would have recognised.

I have certainly gained an understanding of how complex AI is, and how it has both positive and negative implications in its use.