A modern
grandfather clock.

Grandfather Clock offers a new way to read the time, not through numbers, but through moments. Instead of displaying standard time, it shows phrases that represent what a posh grandfather might be doing at that exact time of day (refreshes every 30 seconds). It's a playful reimagining of how we "tell time."

The inspiration for this project came from wanting to incorporate ChatGPT into a clock. At first I wanted to ask the AI, "What time is it?" and have it render that result. ChatGPT occasionally hallucinates and gets the time wrong, and I liked the idea of showing the tension between factual time and these misinterpretations. However, when I tried this approach with the OpenAI API, I found out that it doesn't have access to real-time information and had to pivot.

That's when I began thinking about other ways to tell time. The idea of "telling time" itself—as a form of narrative or description—inspired the concept of using ChatGPT to generate phrases. Simultaneously, I was reminded of the traditional grandfather clock and saw an opportunity to combine these two threads. The result is Grandfather Clock, an AI-native clock with a humanized sense of time passing—one that's a little more about life's moments and less about the rigid ticking of traditional timepieces.