Why Soul Machines Made an AI Baby – UploadVR

At Soul Machines, a company that uses artificial intelligenceto create lifelike avatars that respond to human emotion, a fair amountof their work could be considered unsettling to the average person who fears the coming takeover by our AI-robot overlords.

Its a company that pretty much lives in the uncanny valley, that space between fake and real that can creep people out, but thats not usually what happens when people meet BabyX, said Soul Machines founder Mark Sagar.

Instead, he says, when the baby begins to whimper or cry, some respond in human ways, demonstratingwhat appears to be sympathy similar to the kind they maylavish on a human baby.

Ill probably get about 10 or 15 percent of people respond with thats creepy, and others it doesnt bother them at all. Ultimately its about creating an emotional connection and then people jump right into that, he said.

To see which of these two camps you fall into, watch the video below.

Sagar is an associate professor based at the University of Auckland in New Zealand. Hes won an Academy Award for constructing lifelike animated faces for movies like King Kong and Spider-Man 2, work that began at Sagars Laboratory for Animate Technologies to create human movement designed not by actual human movement but byneural networks.There Sagar and staff combine fields like affective computing, bioengineering, theoretical neuroscience, and AI.

Soul Machines makes avatars ranging from a cartoon strawberry for a kids TV show to Nadia, an avatar voiced by actress Cate Blanchett that is able to serve Australian citizens looking for assistance from the National Disability Insurance Scheme.

Other potential applications range from autonomous characters for VR, education, entertainment and gaming, and as a virtual assistants or customer service agents.

Within the coming year to 18 months, Soul Machines plans to open a platform for people to create their own avatars, like a more realistic Bitmoji.

Potential applications of itstech are numerous, but Soul Machines decided to create an AI baby because babies are natural learning machines and as a way to explore the field of social learning, because the companywants to train AI the same way humans raise children.

Its like really looking at the basics of how parents teach children, Sagar said. How does that interaction loop work? Because if we can create that with a computer, weve actually created a very natural way for people to teach computers.

It also helps lower performance expectations for the AI Sagar believes there wont be anything that approaches adult levels of cognition for a long time.

Avatars are made with biologically inspired cognitive models to give the most lifelike interaction as possible. Sagar isnt as concerned about entering uncanny valley as he is focused onavatars establishing a deep connection.

The brain reacts differently to something it perceives to be alive versus something which it perceives to be inanimate, he said. If you ever see a realistic eye looking at you, youre much more likely to respond than if you see a cartoon eye looking at you.

Responses to human emotion are also part of Soul Machines avatars, which can respond to human emotion it sees through cameras that track facial expression.

So should a Soul Machines avatar be in a store window or kiosk, it might look you in the eye. Look away and it could respond with body language meant to convey disappointment or sadness as a way to get your attention. A shop owner could also choose a more humorous or intellectual appeal, or portray a personality associated with their brand.

With biometrics, Soul Machines can remember faces and use AI to determine the best response based on previous interactions.

In time, affective computing couldbe used to create personality profiles that follow you around the world the waycookies follow you on the web across apps, games, virtual reality, and shop windows to develop an understanding of how to best serve your customer service needs (or manipulate you).

Affective computing is technology that can detecthuman emotion, and its being used to serve peopleads in supermarkets but also to improve sales or boardroom performance and, as Cogito does, help understand when veterans with PTSD need help.

In case you needed things to get even more futuristic or sci-fi, Sagar said in the future he may consider combining affective computing, avatars, and AI designed to mimic the tone, style, and word usage of people both alive and dead.

Its an idea that has been part of the popular imagination for some time but is now coming to life in a series of products and projects.

The New Dimensions in Testimony initiative from the University of Southern California interviews Holocaust survivors and makes a hologram of them. When combined with NLP, a person can ask the hologram virtually any question about their life experience; its like a memoir that can talk to you.

Using old chat conversation transcripts,the startup Luka created a neural network after the death of Roman Mazurenko, a close friend of CEO Eugenia Kuyda. A near-identical scenario played out on the TV show Black Mirror when a woman allowed a company to scrape her husbands old emails and put that avatar into a lifelike robot so she could be with him again.

Its a phenomena Sagar calls the creation of digital ghosts and a virtual spirit world.

Id be very interested in combining Luka-type technology with ours and just seeing the implications of that. I think its really a fascinating thing, he said. Once youve built an avatar, plus youve got the transcripts, you essentially created a digital ghost. Essentially were creating this kind of virtual spirit world.

Demos of BabyX 5.0 will begin in late 2017 or 2018, a company spokesperson said.

This post by Khari Johnson originally appeared on VentureBeat.

Tagged with: artificial intelligence

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Why Soul Machines Made an AI Baby - UploadVR