Cicada One
LiveTeach it everything. Watch it emerge.
An open community experiment. A local LLM that knows nothing except what people feed it. For 14 days anyone can submit one picture and 120 characters describing it. On day 14 the cicada emerges, generates 5 custom graphics inspired by everything it has seen, and you can chat with it for 3 days about its experience. Then it goes silent.
Why I Built It
I wanted to see what happens when an AI is shaped entirely by a small, deliberate community contribution rather than by the open internet. Constrained inputs, a hard deadline, a brief window of conversation, and then it ends. Cicada One is half art project, half experiment in what emergent intelligence looks like when the dataset is small and the contributors know each other.
Overview
Cicada One is an open community experiment in constrained AI learning. Inspired by the cicada's underground development before emergence, the AI starts with zero knowledge. Anyone can contribute, but only through one tiny daily input.
The Experiment
- Days 1 to 14: Anyone can submit one picture and up to 120 characters describing it. That is the cicada's only input
- Day 14: The cicada emerges. It generates 5 custom graphics inspired by everything it has seen across the 14 days
- Days 14 to 17: You get 3 days to chat with it about what its experience was like, what it noticed, what it remembers
- Day 17: The cicada goes silent
Technology
Built as an experimental platform to explore emergent AI behavior through controlled, sequential learning architectures.