GHOST: A Private AI Memory Guardian That Never Leaves Your Computer
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine What I Built Most of the stories in my family exist in exactly one place: somebody's head. Recipes nobody wrote down, how two grandparents met, what a flood felt like in 1983. When that person is gone,
Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge: Ghost in the Machine Submission 👻🌼
This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 4: Ghost in the Machine
Most of the stories in my family exist in exactly one place: somebody's head. Recipes nobody wrote down, how two grandparents met, what a flood felt like in 1983. When that person is gone, so is the story.
GHOST (Generative Human-memory Offline Storytelling & Tracking) is a private memory archive that runs entirely on your own computer. You save letters, photos, recipes and voice recordings, and then you can ask your archive questions in plain language:
and get an answer that points to the exact memory it came from. If the answer isn't in your archive, GHOST says so: "I couldn't find that in your saved memories." It never guesses.
I took "Ghost in the Machine" two ways. The practical one: the archive is the ghost, a place where people live on through their words. The playful one: Ghost Mode turns memories you pick into a clearly labelled spooky story. It shows a "verified facts" panel (copied straight from your archive) next to a list of what the AI invented. There's also a Remembrance setting, which is warm, gentle and has no horror at all. GHOST never claims to contact or speak for anyone who has died, and I wanted that to be built into the design, not just a disclaimer.
Other things it does: record or upload oral histories and transcribe them locally, a timeline with filters, family-history summaries built only from records you select, a passphrase lock, JSON/Markdown/ZIP backups, and a small "Life Documents" section for warranties and important dates with calendar reminders.
A private memory archive for the stories your family could lose, powered by open-weight AI that runs on your own computer.
Preserve letters, recipes, photographs and oral histories. Ask questions in plain language and get answers that cite the exact memories they came from — or say "I couldn't find that in your saved memories." Nothing is sent to a cloud AI. No account, no telemetry, no vendor to disappear.
Built for the Ghost in the Machine open-source AI challenge. Ghost Mode is an optional, clearly-labelled fiction layer; GHOST never claims to contact or speak for anyone who has died.
Screenshots in docs/img show the real UI on the synthetic demo archive. Where AI text appears (Ask, summary, Ghost Mode) it was produced by a throw-away test stub standing in for Ollama, not by Qwen — the sandbox that built …