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Tag Archive for AI

Talk Data to Me

July 1, 2015 future, Videogames, Writing Comments Off on Talk Data to Me

 

http://arxiv.org/pdf/1506.05869v2.pdf

There’s a difference, a pretty large difference, between an AI and a chatbot. It’s perhaps hard to see if you’re on the receiving end, if you don’t know what to look for, but the way they act and react are different and in the case of a chatbot, once you figure out how the logic behind it works, you can talk it in circles.  Which is a good way to kill an afternoon, if you’re bored on the intarwebz.

Not that I have ever done this.  Oh no, not me.

The point of a chatbot, usually, is to mimic conversation.  They are often not capable of *steering* a conversation themselves, they don’t, or can’t, as leading questions unless the developer has planned ahead (and even then, you can tell when the canned questions come into play, the segues are never terribly smooth).  What they can do reasonably well, however, is continue a conversation in much the same way that many humans do.  It deconstructs your sentence, pulls the appropriate verbs and subjects, and constructs a question or response of it’s own.

If you’ve ever gotten a customer service call, or contacted customer service through one of those “live chat” services offered by banks and online retailers you’ve likely encountered a few chatbots.  Depending on the sophistication, they are often used to just collect your basic information before passing you off to a real-live human, but you can hear the difference if you listen.

 

 

The Illusion of Life

February 12, 2015 future, Writing Comments Off on The Illusion of Life

You’ve hear me opine (briefly) about the Uncanny Valley before.  That place where things look realistic, but it’s not the *right* kind of real and it makes out brains freak out a bit?  You’ve felt the effect, maybe a friend of yours had one of those realistic plush cats curled up on the sofa, or you ran across a street performer playing a very good game of statue.

You’ve seen this video before, it’s the one Boston Dynamics released to introduce their newer, smaller and lighter autonomous quadruped, “Spot”.  And interestingly enough, a whole lot of people on the internet were made uncomfortable when the robot got kicked to show off it’s re-balancing capability.  If you haven’t watched it yet, go ahead.

It makes you feel kind of bad, doesn’t it?  Even though it’s a robot, even though it looks nothing like a dog or a pony or a llama, you’re still just a bit outraged that that engineer would boot it so casually, and on ICE as well!

I’d posit that this critter just walked up out of the Uncanny Valley.  Not with regards to it’s looks, but with regards to the way it moves and reacts to the kick.  Our brains can register that it is scrambling, that those motions are being created ON THE FLY by the limited AI that drives the thing and so, to us, it has become just a little more “real”.

So if a robot that looks nothing like a living creature can still trip the circuits in our brain that say “it’s alive”, maaaaaaybe the Uncanny Valley effect isn’t so much about how a thing LOOKS, but rather about how it MOVES.

 

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