Ridiculous AI Zaps People With A Sprinkler To Keep Them Away From Grass
Image via Shutterstock
When you walk on top of growing grass, its growth is inhibited. That’s the problem that caused Ryder Damen, the engineer behind the Ryder Calm Down YouTube channel, to develop AI that activates a sprinkler to blitz water at those who get too close.
Yes, he could just put up a sign, but “there is no teacher quite like fear,” Damen declares. (He’s joking).
This isn’t his first humorous AI creation – a scroll through his YouTube content reveals some gems like the machine that pours wine with every Slack notification, a tool to measure how angry the internet is, and “the dog detector to make me feel better.” As stated on his website, his goal in creating what he does is “to make content that make people laugh,” otherwise described as “the intersection of comedy and technology.”
In the introduction of the video, he explains, “About a year ago the city dug up the sidewalk in front of my house and I’m not sure why. So now there is a whole bunch of dirt where the sidewalk used to be and people keep walking over top of it. I’m trying to plant grass, but it doesn’t grow when people keep walking on it.”
The “dog detector to make me feel better” project utilizes Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi Camera to identify and analyze subjects via YOLOv3, a machine learning system that is able to recognize about 80 different objects, the most important one in this context being dogs. When a pooch is detected, the machine screams “I like your dog!” at it and its owner.
This lawn-preserving project uses similar technology to recognize when someone is walking on the forbidden land, and alerts the dreaded sprinkler.
Damen recognizes the device as a “highly unethical waste of his engineering degree.”
That being said, be rest assured that no grass-trampling members of the public were actually sprayed in this video. Although the system was really built and put in place, everyone involved was a friend. “The people you see in the video, even the ones portrayed as the public, have all agreed to be in the video prior to filming,” the disclaimer in his video description reads.
“I wouldn’t recommend you actually build anything like this yourself, I just wanted to make a video that I thought was entertaining.”
[via PetaPixel, image via Shutterstock]
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