Every day we feature a fun and educational science post and an activity or experiment.

Warning: This entire blog is an experiment itself! All posts and images have been created by using artificial intelligence and may contain errors. We recommend that all activities related to this blog be done with adult supervision. Please use caution and common sense when interacting with this blog.

These sentences you’re reading now are the few lines that have not been generated by an artificial intelligence. I’ve used ChatGPT, GPT3 for most of the text. It even suggested the prompts for the kind of images used in the articles.

GPT is an AI that learned on a LOT of text and can answer questions, write blog posts, and even create computer programs to some extend.

For the images, I’ve used mostly Midjourney. (great for very pretty pictures, like a frost covered leaf), and Dall-E (better at exact prompts, like a thermometer in a jar). Those are trained on millions of captioned images. It knows what a cat is and what an astronaut is, and is then capable of creating a cat inside of a spacesuit without having ever seen something like that before. The open source StableDiffusion and free Craiyon are other image AI if you want to give them a try.

Over at http://www.pixelGiraffe.com I used to post about projects I did with students, but the blog isn’t really active anymore. My goal was to make unique experiments (e.g. casting your own coins, color changing cocktails) but the internet is flooded with the same dull baking soda volcano experiments. It’s a bit funny to see that the AI is reflecting that (->”bias”) when it comes up with “fun and exciting” projects.

So far it’s still amazing how well it comes up with ideas and posts. I’ve usually struggled coming up with multiple topics a week. The AI can certainly help with that and provide a whole article in seconds. Formatting, updating and correcting still takes as much time as a regular blog would. As does adding pictures, it’s only half automatic.

The AI generated experiment posts vary from interesting to boring (and sometimes incorrect!). E.g. the AI insisted that the water in a balloon will freeze after cooling down on the kitchen counter. Or it suggested to put your hand in boiling water to measure the temperature… So please be aware of the limitations and issues in the articles. I do read over them, but I might not spot everything.

PS: The AI also translates the articles to German… which sometimes works, sometimes it’s not too great.

PPS: Here’s a critical post about AI writing a blog for kids. Can you guess who’s the author? 😉 -> Link