Ethan Jagoda, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, has developed Scribble AI, an app designed to make artificial intelligence (AI) more accessible.
The Blue Valley North High School graduate's goal is to make using artificial intelligence easier by providing a simpler user experience than other AI apps and websites.
Jagoda said that AI works by “taking a bunch of data and learning from that data, and trying to basically act as a human would and create outputs that are similar.”
Jagoda started the Scribble AI app at UC Berkeley with co-founders and friends Sahil Mehta and Jayaditya Sethi. The app was developed and launched within three weeks during their winter break. They were inspired by the release of ChatGPT (Chat Generative Pre-trained Transformer), a chatbot system that allows users to converse with and generate texts from AI.
“[ChatGPT] really showed us AI technology is moving very quickly, and we wanted to take advantage of the trend,” Jagoda said.
Scribble AI allows users to generate up to 300 words of text using artificial intelligence. The user first chooses what kind of text they want to create; options include serious texts such as emails, invitations and essays, and lighthearted texts such as rap songs, poems, musicals and love letters. The user is also able to write what they want to generate. Users can then enter whatever subject they want the AI to write about.
As for the text the AI generates, the user can choose the “style” of wording, such as professional, technical, romantic, or even written like a pirate, among others. Multiple languages are available, including Spanish, French, Mandarin, Arabic and more.
“We played around, [finding out] what it can do,” Jagoda said about the app and its setting options. “We tried to show the full extent of what the AI is capable of.”
According to Jagoda, Scribble AI is different from other AI applications and websites, including those that use similar code, because of its ease of functionality.
“We’re really striving to lower the barrier of access to technology,” Jagoda said. “The interface is really easy to use, especially compared to any existing text generation like ChatGPT. It’s actually really good… for [composing] emails or any long messages. For instance, my dad uses it for [his] Facebook posts.”
AI’s capabilities and potential usages are still being discovered and honed. Its potential application in certain fields, such as religion and art, are controversial. From a Jewish perspective, a Business Insider article was published on Feb. 16 about a rabbi who used ChatGPT to write a sermon and was “deathly afraid” after receiving applause from his congregation. A post on the Chabad website compares AI to the golems of Jewish folklore.
Jagoda sees a positive future with the widespread adoption of AI as a tool “to be used to make humans more efficient, rather than replace humans.”
AI can also be used to preserve the stories of historical figures, including Holocaust survivors. AI is being used to develop an interactive legacy interview with local Holocaust survivor Sonia Warshawski, star of the documentary “Big Sonia.” StoryFile has been working on the project, which the company says will be completed soon.
Scribble AI, though free to users, is costing its co-founders money. Jagoda estimates that he, Mehta and Sethi have already paid about $50 for 25,000 generations by the app’s users. In order to recoup some of the investment, Scribble AI will include advertisements in the near future.
“As it scales up, we do understand that that cost is going to go up,” Jagoda said. “We just want to offset the cost of new AI.”
Scribble AI is available for Android and Apple products for free on Google Play, the App Store, and MacOS.