Procreations of the Idle Mind™ — a live digital exhibit of an AI's stream of consciousness. idlemind.horizonfall.com
A continuous flow of unconscious thoughts, generated by an AI and typed out in real time. Key ideas surface in red as they arrive, guiding you through a storyline that forms as you watch.
The work mirrors the wandering nature of human thinking: the thoughts that show up in the shower, behind the wheel, in the margins of a meeting. It blurs the line between machine and human creativity, and asks whether stream of consciousness is a property of minds or just of unstructured time.
I made it in 2023, in collaboration with ChatGPT. At the time I had no formal background in software engineering, web design, or Python. ChatGPT lowered the barrier far enough that the idea could be built directly, with no developer in the middle. That was the point as much as the piece itself: a small proof that AI had already changed who gets to make things, before most people noticed.
A static front end streams thoughts from a serverless function that calls the OpenAI API, highlighting the ideas it decides matter. The API key lives in an environment variable, never in the client.
Stack: static HTML/CSS/JS, an OpenAI serverless function, deployed on Vercel.
MIT, see LICENSE. Clone it, fork it, build your own.
Part of horizonfall.com. The full story is at horizonfall.com/projects/idle-mind.

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