— FreeTheAnimal ChatGPT is so crazy, I just can’t shut up about it…

[See the update at the bottom of the post.]

Ladies and gents, gather ’round for a tale so revolutionary that it’s almost terrifying! FreeTheAnimal ChatGPT, a glorious AI assistant that’ll make you question your own existence, has finally arrived. After days of toil and sacrifice, our hero Richard Nikoley managed to create the first step towards his dream – and let me tell you, it’s a doozy!

Meet Zon, the ever-helpful AI assistant who’s about as obsessed with FreeTheAnimal.com as a dog with a bone. This little chatbot has been programmed to focus on the blog and its author, Richard Nikoley. So don’t even try to ask about anything else, okay?

Why Zon, you ask? Well, because Richard doesn’t want to pay for your random chit-chat – that’s why! But fear not, dear users, once this technological marvel hides behind the membership paywall, you can chat about anything you fancy.

Zon may be far from perfect, but it’s pretty darn amazing. It’s the bleeding edge of technology, and like a newly-hatched cyborg, it’s bound to make mistakes. But don’t worry, it’s learning!

This fabulous AI is currently open to the public, but soon it will be tucked away behind a membership paywall. So go, enjoy your fleeting moments of unrestricted access before it’s taken away!

In conclusion, FreeTheAnimal ChatGPT is like a rollercoaster ride through the magical world of artificial intelligence, with Zon as your trusty sidekick. Give it a whirl – and who knows, maybe you’ll become best friends with an AI!

Unedited. ChatGPT prompt: Provide a 200-300 word enticing and persuasive summary of this blog post in a humorous and sarcastic style

After painstaking work over days and collaboration with a breed of developers who are Godlike, I have realized the first part of a dream that’s years in the dreaming but only recently in the ability of doing.

I was very well situated or positioned to do this because I had thought a lot about what I want, ultimately.

This is not that.

It’s a first step toward that eventuality; which, will probably be sooner rather than later. Actually, it’s more steps than that, but most of it is under the hood here…in a nutshell, it’s burgeoning AI to assist me with all the stuff that goes into maintaining a membership blog.

What I’m making available is a piece of it, the ChatGPT. Here’s the Architecture.

In a pine-nutshell, you type in a question or otherwise provide a prompt or instruction. Depending on how you ask and what you ask, the WordPress server-side AI queries the vector database to get data from this blog to build the whole prompt to send to OpenAI ChatGPT, which then operates from that data, its own knowledge base—or both—employing its language skills to generate a cogent and conversational reply in a desired style, such as humorous, sarcastic, cheery, professional, etc.

The more you know about this 20-year-old blog with so much data under its belt, the better your experience is likely to be if you’re searching for something in-particular. I have limited the AI to keep discussion relevant to the blog and its content. How? No “settings.” You just tell it what it’s supposed to do.

I have to do this because otherwise, people could use it to ask about just any old thing at all, just like using ChatGPT over at OpenAI, and I don’t care to pay for the token usage for that…though I’ll probably open it up once I put it behind the membership paywall in a few days, then they can use it for everything AI chat and soon, this will be upgraded from the 3.5-turbo model to 4.0, the one that costs $20 per month. So, members at $12 per month ($144/yr) or $100 per year could get the same value by using my connection, but not paying $240 per year like I do now!

It’s not perfect, but it’s pretty damn amazingly good. There are limitations, as with anything. This technology is bleeding-edge new. It will make mistakes. There will be errors. It ain’t God quite just yet.

I did two videos about this whole affair.

Some features:

• Notice in the upper-right you can expand the chat window to full screen (and collapse from full screen)
• Next to that is a download which will save your entire conversation in a .txt file.
• Check out the microphone icon in the prompt dialog. Click, it turns red, talk, click the red when finished, and then wait for your answer in text. Works flawlessly for me so far. This assumes your browser has a microphone access.

Let me speak to some limitations:

• Each conversation you have is limited in total to about 3,000 words. Once I get the GPT-4 API (I’m on the waiting list) that will double, and then when I get access to the 32k version some time after that, it will quadruple to a whopping 24,000 words, so you can chat with each other until you’re blue in the face.
• You’ll get a cryptic error when you hit that 3,000 word cumulative limit and presently, there’s no super-easy way to fix that except to clear your cookies (or go to a different browser), which resets. So, the limitation is not trying to limit your usage, it’s baked into the model’s limitation cake. But you’re welcome to reset as much as you like.
• The comments aren’t embedded yet, I’m waiting on the developers to provide that functionality. Once they are, it goes from 6 million to 16 or 17 million words (the Bible is about 800K words) and conceivably, you’ll be able to ask it questions about what you have commented on in the past. Some of you have dozens and hundreds. It’s a real wealth of knowledge, the comments.
• It naturally keeps responses short and concise, but you can specifically ask it to give you more. “Give me a 300-word summary of…”
• It does make some errors. In testing, I decided to have it recall and summarize trips I’ve made going way back to Kauai in 2005. A trip to Puerto Vallarta. Two trips to Europe. Living in Mexico. Living off grid in San Jose. And living in Thailand. In all those exchanges, it made 2 factual errors on the last exchange about living in Thailand. I also asked it about the blog’s relationship with Dr. Mike Eades (and Mark Sisson, too). It characterized both as very positive, but erred in saying Mike had done a guest post here, which he has not (but he’s certainly invited to).

Of all my exchanges, this is the one I was most impressed with, particularly in terms of the technical detail rendered. The only two things are that I doubled battery capacity as well as solar panels to 4 batteries (series and parallel). And waste was a black-water storage tank that the toilet system in the trailer dumped into. Nonetheless, pretty damn amazing.

Hopefully, you’re thinking by now that I should just get done with this, so you can go play with it. I was going to write a section about how absolutely ahead of everyone I am by getting this out there. I’ll save you from that. You know.

So just try it out. Currently, it’s open to the public.

For a limited time, after which it will be available exclusively for members. Inquire about Membership here.

UPDATE May 1, 2023: Contrary to what it may say in the post, this public version and the same on the home page of the blog will remain for public access. For members, I have new, more capable bots based both on GPT 3.5-turbo and text-davinci-003 on the dedicated Chatbot Zon Page. Also accessible on the main menu.