September 4, 2020 Artificial Intelligentsia Building Character: Writing a Backstory for Our AI By Mariana Lin “Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language, I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba!” —Henry Higgins in George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion Eliza Doolittle (after whom the iconic AI therapist program ELIZA is named) is a character of walking and breathing rebellion. In George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, and in the musical adaptation My Fair Lady, she metamorphoses from a rough-and-tumble Cockney flower girl into a self-possessed woman who walks out on her creator. There are many such literary characters that follow this creator-creation trope, eventually rejecting their creator in ways both terrifying and sympathetic: after experiencing betrayal, Frankenstein’s monster kills everyone that Victor Frankenstein loves, and the roboti in Karel Capek’s Rossum’s Universal Robots rise up to kill the humans who treat them as a slave class. It’s the most primordial of tales, the parent-child story gone terribly wrong. We’ve long been captivated by the idea of creating new nonhuman life, and equally captivated by the punishment we fear such godlike powers might trigger. In a world of growing AI beings, such dystopian outcomes are becoming real fears. As we set out to create these alternate beings, the questions of how we should design them, what they should be crafted to say and do, become questions of not only art and science but morality. Read More
May 2, 2018 Artificial Intelligentsia How to Write Personalities for the AI Around Us By Mariana Lin You just can’t differentiate between a robot and the very best of humans. —Dr. Lanning in I, Robot, by Isaac Asimov As a little twenty-first-century cocktail-party experiment, quote that line to someone, and observe whether it elicits hope or fear. Asimov understood the core terror of AI-human relations: replication, confusion, eventual domination, and chaos. What makes his statement discomfiting nowadays is how quickly we are advancing toward a reality in which those relations are increasingly commonplace. Yet it stands to reason that more versions of the “very best of humans”—or, alternatively, more things that bring out the “very best of humans”—would make the world a better place. Today the list of AI who are household names is short: Siri, Watson, Alexa, Sophia, Paro, Cortana, Pepper, Erica … But on a day not far from tomorrow, I’m quite sure this list will be a hundred times as long. The AI arena is expanding rapidly, and virtual and robotic products are being developed as quickly as we are finding needs for them. Within a decade or so, AI will be everywhere, corporeally and incorporeally living among us: driving us, assisting in medicine, teaching our children, guiding us on tours, getting our coffee, or, perhaps more important, spouting original, personally crafted limericks. If we design our AI to simply function well, our society may progress with increased speed in efficiency and convenience. But if we are also designing them to have thoughtful personalities and belief systems, our society may advance in areas where we have ostensibly made less progress—enhancing joy, delight, compassion, and deeper relationships. Read More
February 12, 2018 Artificial Intelligentsia Absurdist Dialogues with Siri By Mariana Lin Nagg: Me sugar-plum! Clov: There’s a rat in the kitchen! Hamm: A rat! Are there still rats? Clov: In the kitchen there’s one. Hamm: And you haven’t exterminated him? Clov: Half. You disturbed us. Hamm: He can’t get away? Clov: No. Hamm: You’ll finish him later. Let us pray to God. Clov: Again! Nagg: Me sugar-plum! —Samuel Beckett, Endgame For many years now, I have sat down daily to script lines for AI characters such as Siri and Sophia. It’s an unusual task. First, it involves channeling the personality of a nonhuman living among humans. Then, even more confounding, one must trace the ideal conversation between human and robot. In voice interface design, this is called the “happy path.” And the existence of a happy path implies, of course, the existence of many more “unhappy paths.” Read More