Who needs love when you have a chat bot talking dirty and oozing eternal devotion?
To give its artificial intelligence systems the ability to speak conversationally, Google is feeding one of them a diet of romance novels, a new report said. “Google’s research team recently got the AI to write sentences that resemble those in the books,” Buzzfeed reported.
“With that achievement unlocked, they’re now planning to move on to bigger challenges: using the conversational styles the AI has learned to inform and humanize the company’s products, such as the typically staid Google app.”
Although AI has a host of applications in technology, its use in improving chat bots – virtual assistants to help consumers with tasks such as shopping-related internet searches – is a notable focus.
Google software engineer Andrew Dai, who led the project, told the news site that the books are intended to give AI better conversational skills, and more variations in tone and style. Dai said romance novels provide effective learning for AI because the stories are mostly the same, but use different language.
“The AI can detect which sentences contain similar meanings and gain a more nuanced understanding of language,” the article said. “Romance novels work better than children’s learn-to-read books, since they offer a broad range of linguistic examples for the AI to draw from.”
As romance-infused AI develops, it’s possible that people could fall in love with a software entity, Dai said. “There’s an ancient Greek story about a guy who builds a statue of the most beautiful woman. The statue is more beautiful than any other woman, and he falls in love with the statue. If you can fall in love with a statue, I don’t see why you couldn’t fall in love with a neural network trained on romance novels,” he said.
The article did not provide an explanation from Dai as to whether measures would be taken to ensure AI doesn’t pick up the steamier language of romance novels, some of which might not be appreciated by all consumers.
Photo: From the musical “Light in the Piazza.” (courtesy Willows Theatre Company)
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