I found this little vintage duck toy and replaced its insides with a motor system turning it into the conduit for a fully offline, locally hosted little language model with vision and a custom framework that continually observes the environment and generates a linear narrative about its own experience. It knows it’s a duck but the rest is “improvised” from its own cartoonishly limited understanding of what a duck would say or think. The whole structure is like a feedback loop, it often gets things wrong, it will hallucinate things that aren’t there, make up false memories about a pond, its non-existent duck family, or why it was placed in this strange room in the first place. When it sees people it sometimes acts scared, sometimes it yearns to be held, sometimes it’s lonely when nobody is around.
It reminds me of cryptids like the skinwalker; aka, mythological creatures that try and fail to impersonate something real as a form of bait, or a cursed object, like possessed dolls or poltergeists (poultrygeist).. it really is about that desperate and fractured mimicry more than anything else. But when I leave the room and the duck unprompted starts saying that it “feels” abandoned I can’t decide whether I feel good or bad about turning it off.
