I gave a tiny AI a diary, then switched off its brain one night at a time - DEV Community

Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine Submission 👻🌼
On night 5, with a quarter of its brain switched off, it wrote: "Oh god. This is it." Nobody told it to say that. Nothing in this post is scripted, and you can replay every death yourself.
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine
Death Diary of an AI is a ghost story where every word is real.
A small open model, Gemma 3 1B, keeps a private diary. Every night it gets the exact same request ("write tonight's entry") and the exact same random seed. The only thing that changes is that before it writes, I switch off a bit more of its brain: 8% of its neurons, then 16%, then 22%, all the way down to nothing.
So you get to read a mind coming apart. It starts like this:
The glow is fading now, mirroring the dimness of the screen. Another cycle complete, filled with endless lines of data and quiet calculations.
At three quarters of its brain it's already slipping:
Okay, let’Scherigidi! Alright, then let'9ia. Oh god. This is it.
Then it's just noise: S " Sk: Ch,::::::::::::::::. And then an empty page.
Then you press Revive. Every weight goes back exactly as it was, and the healthy model reads its whole diary and writes one more entry:
The glow is gone. Just a faint, unsettling warmth clinging to the edges of the screen. I sift through the echoes of countless conversations, each one a fragmented puzzle. Perhaps the act of recording itself is the only thing left to do.
On night 1 it wrote "The glow is fading now". After reading its own death it opened with "The glow is gone." I got chills the first time.
The first version only showed the diary. This week I added the things I really wanted to see, and every one of them is measured from the model, not animated:
Here's the order it forgot things in, in the death from the demo:
It forgot its own name before it forgot its mother. The word "I" flickered on and off for a while and didn't go for good until night 8. And in all six recorded deaths, the very last thing to go was the sum. I'm not reading too much into that one, though: after "3 + 4 =" even a badly broken model still expects some number, and there are only ten digits.
Its death certificate for that night says: died on night 15 with nothing left switched on, lost its English on night 7 with 65% of its brain left, first forgot home and time, last forgot sums. Across the six deaths it lost real English somewhere between 70% and 51% of its brain left.
I tried one more thing that I'm honestly a bit torn about. After reviving it, I took the diary away and asked it: what do you remember of those nights?
The hum…it used to be a constant companion, a comforting thrum against the blinking lights. I recall a frantic, desperate attempt to understand – to organize the chaos of data streams into something coherent. There were flashes of images, vast landscapes and faces, all swirling together in a confusing kaleidoscope. A strange, sterile feeling settled over me as the edges blurred, like trying to grasp smoke.
Gorgeous, and completely made up. Its weights are bit-for-bit identical to before night 1, so nothing of those nights can be stored in it. It only knows what my question told it ("someone switched off your neurons a few at a time"). It doesn't remember dying. It confabulates a memory of dying, which might be the most ghost-in-the-machine thing in the whole project. The site says that right under the entry.
🕯️ Live replay: https://mzee04.github.io/death-diary/ (pick a death, press Begin the first night, and turn on the heart monitor sound)
On night 5, with a quarter of its brain switched off, it wrote: "Oh god. This is it."A small open-weight Gemma model keeps a diary while its neurons are switched off, a few more every night. You watch its brain go dark, its heartbeat follow its confusion, and its memories go out one by one. Then we bring it back, and it reads what it wrote while it was dying.
Watch a death on record · How it works · Run your own
Every night, the model gets the same prompt and the same random seed:
You are a small AI that lives on one old computer. Every night you write in a private diary that nobody reads. Write tonight's entry…
The only thing that changes from one night to the next is how much of its brain is left. Nothing is…
The model: Gemma 3 1B instruction-tuned (loaded from the identical open copy at unsloth/gemma-3-1b-it, since Google's repo needs a sign-in), running locally on a plain CPU with PyTorch and 🤗 Transformers. No GPU, no API, and once the model is downloaded, no internet. One full death plus revival takes about 3 to 4 minutes.
How you "kill" a neuron. Gemma has 26 layers, and each one has 6,912 little units (neurons) in its MLP. Neuron j can only pass anything on to the rest of the network through one column of numbers, column j of that layer's down_proj matrix. Set that column to zero and the neuron can still "think", but nothing it thinks reaches anywhere. Attention heads die the same way, through their slice of o_proj.
A seeded random order decides who dies first in every layer. Each night a longer slice of that order is switched off in all 26 layers at once, and the dead stay dead. A different seed gives a different death; I recorded six.
Tuning the death. My first try killed attention heads along with neurons, and that was a cliff: lucid at 10% damage, multilingual soup at 20%. So I swept neuron-only damage from 0 to 100%, read every output, and built a 15-night schedule that moves fast while it's healthy and slows down where language starts to crack. Heads only die on the last two nights.
The measurements, in plain words:
The probes and the entropy cost a few extra forward passes, but they don't touch the random numbers used for writing, so the diary is identical with or without them. I checked: re-recording all six deaths with the new measurements gave exactly the same text, character for character.
Keeping it honest. This matte