Pegor Karoglanian's smahtSticker Is ChatGPT-Powered Social and Political Camouflage for Your Car

Software engineer Pegor Karoglanian has built a clever piece of social camouflage: a programmable bumper sticker that tries to figure out the most popular political opinion in a given area and display your support thereof, with a little help from OpenAI's ChatGPT.

"The smahtSticker is an AI powered 'smart' bumper sticker designed to let you blend in to any part of town," Karoglanian explains of the project. "It features a Raspberry Pi Zero paired with an ~8" LCD and GPS module to pinpoint your exact location while you're driving. With this data we turn to one of OpenAI's cutting edge AI models to accurately predict the most likely political view of that area. The response is then used to display the appropriate bumper sticker to fit you, and your car, right in."

While admitting that the device's accuracy is merely best-effort, working as it does on a zip-code level and relying on a large language model that is known to hallucinate and provide best-fit responses which do not rely on truthfulness, Karoglanian's approach is interesting: OpenAI's ChatGPT was queried for a list of conservative bumper stickers, then liberal ones. The resulting lists were narrowed down to six for each political viewpoint, which Karoglanian then created and loaded onto the Raspberry Pi Zero for display on the LCD.

As the vehicle drives around, the GPS tracks its location — and, if it's moved more than 25 feet, geolocates the driver's location to a zip code. That zip code is then submitted as a fresh query to ChatGPT, which is asked to provide the most popular political viewpoint for the area — prompting the smahtSticker to pick a new image from one of the two lists.

"Huge disclaimer," Karoglanian notes of the project, which has been released under the permissive MIT license on GitHub. "I don't actually drive around with this thing. It's mainly a joke on tech and politics!"