Category Archives: Artificial Intelligence

Bots are a new medium

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Kevin Kelly points us to an interesting piece on bots by John Borthwick. Turns out bots are a bigger thing than I realized, and they’re gonna get a lot bigger.

“Most researchers estimate that during the election cycle, bots made up approximately a quarter of all the online chatter on a particular issue or meme. […] As people understand that accounts aren’t necessarily human, they will start to trust platforms and networks less.”

Mr. Borthwick make reference to Dexter which is (I think) a service that will help you develop a bot for your business (or whatever). You can see my chat session with their demo below. And if you’re feeling a little lonely…

Chat bots are going to become a thing in 2017, as Clem the CEO of Hugging Face, an awesomely interesting chat bot company says, “everyone, one day will have an AI friend”.

 

New tests for AI

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Kevin Kelly points to a list of new tests for AI (now that it’s whupped human champs of chess, Jeopardy and Go. A few of my favorites below. I hope I live to see some of these. Such intelligence will have no patience for putting human morons in charge of anything important.

9. Take a written passage and output a recording that can’t be distinguished from a voice actor, by an expert listener.

18. Fold laundry as well and as fast as the median human clothing store employee.

26. Write an essay for a high-school history class that would receive high grades and pass plagiarism detectors. For example answer a question like ‘How did the whaling industry affect the industrial revolution?’

27. Compose a song that is good enough to reach the US Top 40. The system should output the complete song as an audio file.

28. Produce a song that is indistinguishable from a new song by a particular artist, e.g. a song that experienced listeners can’t distinguish from a new song by Taylor Swift.

29. Write a novel or short story good enough to make it to the New York Times best-seller list.

31. Play poker well enough to win the World Series of Poker.

Can only humans act?

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Digital effects will make Robert De Niro look decades younger in his new Scorsese movie.
For me this raises interesting questions about the essence of acting. We’ve long been able to create backgrounds and scenes with CGI that are nearly impossible to distinguish from ‘the real thing.’ So where does the acting happen? Facial expression? The body? The tone and inflection of the the actor’s voice? If an AI captures and then perfectly reproduces De Niro’s voice, is that acting? Will we notice or care? Are we close to someone (some thing) passing a cinematic Turing Test?

Japanese white-collar workers replaced by AI

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“One Japanese insurance company, Fukoku Mutual Life Insurance, is reportedly replacing 34 human insurance claim workers with “IBM Watson Explorer,” starting by January 2017. The AI will scan hospital records and other documents to determine insurance payouts, according to a company press release, factoring injuries, patient medical histories, and procedures administered. Automation of these research and data gathering tasks will help the remaining human workers process the final payout faster, the release says.”

“Fukoku Mutual will spend $1.7 million (200 million yen) to install the AI system, and $128,000 per year for maintenance, according to Japan’s The Mainichi. The company saves roughly $1.1 million per year on employee salaries by using the IBM software, meaning it hopes to see a return on the investment in less than two years. Watson AI is expected to improve productivity by 30%.”