drowsy bay
Did you know that there are over 20,000 Subway restaurant locations in America? What if each of those locations contained their own dark secrets lying just under the surface—mysteries that could only be solved by one unusual detective? I built a website that generates a never-ending series of detective stories, set in real Subway restaurants across America. Try it out at SubwaySam.com
Using a database of actual Subway locations and the GPT-3 API, I'm able to generate weird mystery stories that follow my own weird instructions. At the intersection of a David Lynch film, a Haruki Murakami novel, and Mall Rats, Subway Sam delivers fresh mysteries on the web all day and all night.
Y tho?
I really like connecting generative AI to real-world ideas and information. I built this site to explore how we might use the world around us as inspiration for new AI-generated creations. There's nothing more mundane than a Subway restaurant—what if I used the ubiquitous storefronts as portals to mysterious and bizarre stories? Finding a Subway restaurant location database on Kaggle was my first clue. And now each story pulls a random Subway location from the dataset and incorporates it into the mystery. On every click, the AI follows a specific set of guidelines and character backstory while generating a completely new story on demand.
How?
It's really astonishing how useful Chat-GPT is—I have a very <b>basic</b> knowledge of html, and Chat-GPT helps me get stuff done that I'd never be able to on my own. It wrote the code for a lot of the site, like pulling random info from the dataset, connecting the page buttons to the API, and incorporating the random location into the story.
Anything else?
The GPT-3 API can be a bit slow sometimes, I wish there was a way to make the text appear sooner, maybe Chat-GPT can help me figure that out. Also, it'd be really great if Midjourney had a public API—I'd love to have a unique poster generated for each story.
vagrant hound