Okay, so today I’m gonna walk you through my little project, the “t800 carl” thing. It’s basically me messing around with some AI stuff, trying to get a chatbot to act like, well, you guessed it, the Terminator’s Carl character from Dark Fate. Sounds kinda dumb, I know, but it was a fun experiment.
First off, I grabbed a bunch of dialogue from the movie. I mean, a lot of dialogue. I just wanted to make sure I had enough for the AI to, you know, get a feel for the character. I used a script I found online and just copied and pasted all of Carl’s lines into a text file. It was tedious, but necessary.
Then, I started messing around with a simple chatbot framework. I ain’t no AI expert, so I chose something easy to use. I think it was something called “ChatterBot” in Python? I can’t recall exactly. Anyway, I fed it all the dialogue I had. The idea was to train the bot on Carl’s way of talking, his specific phrases, and how he responds to questions. I just let it run for like, an hour or two.
Now, here’s where things got a little tricky. The bot just started spitting out random lines from the movie, totally out of context. It wasn’t really “understanding” anything. So, I tried adding more training data. I added some general knowledge stuff, like about cars and curtains (you know, because of the movie), but it still wasn’t great.
Next, I decided to try a different approach. Instead of just throwing all the dialogue at it, I started crafting specific conversation flows. Like, if someone asks about his family, the bot would respond with a line about “protecting Dani”. If they ask about his mission, it would talk about “fulfilling his purpose”. This helped a little bit, but it was still pretty clunky.
I played around with the chatbot settings. The learning rate, the confidence threshold, all that stuff. Honestly, I didn’t really know what I was doing, I was mostly just guessing and checking. But eventually, I got to a point where the bot could at least hold a basic conversation without sounding completely insane.
So, here’s the final result. It’s not perfect, not even close. It’s a bit janky. Sometimes it repeats itself, sometimes it goes off on tangents. But overall, it kind of sounds like Carl. Maybe if you squint your ears a little bit. I also added a profile picture of Carl. Made it look a bit more professional.
What I Learned
- Training AI is harder than it looks.
- You need a lot of data, and it needs to be organized well.
- I still don’t really understand AI.
Would I do it again? Probably not. It was a fun little experiment, but I think I’ll stick to coding actual apps for now. Still, it was cool to see how far you can get with just a little bit of effort.
