DIY AI Containment Box

Sharing a small experiment that somewhat attracted a lot of attention yesterday, perhaps you'll like it too.

Thesis: Many devices or apps listen in while not in use. We're assured these only do topic matching (ie: identifying keywords) but who knows.

Observation: Today, generative AI can be used to generate a bunch of things, text, code, video but also audio. So why not bid local algorithms against remote algorithms?

Solution: I put my phones in a metal box i'm dubbing "Gaslight Garage", where a speaker plays randomly generated Elevenlabs audio to the phones. The pipeline is fully automated and sometimes hilarious. While white noise generators and other things are detectable, I believe this is much more difficult to detect on-device.

I've yet to see the results but maybe it'll give the one or the other a few ideas. This is pretty much in line with my local LLM extensions (on my blog) to use local-AIs as countermeasures against remote AIs, they love data, right?

Enjoy your Sunday!