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AI Microsoft

Microsoft Proposes AI That Improves When You Smile (venturebeat.com) 39

Posted by msmash from the moving-forward dept.
Positive affectivity, or the characteristic that describes how people experience affects (e.g., sensations, emotions, and sentiments) and interact with others as a result, has been linked to increased interest and curiosity as well as satisfaction in learning. Inspired by this, a team of Microsoft researchers propose imbuing reinforcement learning, an AI training technique that employs rewards to spur systems toward goals, with positive affect, which they assert might drive exploration useful in gathering experiences critical to learning. From a report: As the researchers explain, reinforcement learning is commonly implemented via policy-specific rewards designed for a predefined goal. Problematically, these extrinsic rewards are narrow in scope and can be difficult to define, as opposed to intrinsic rewards that are task-independent and quickly indicate success or failure. In pursuit of an intrinsic policy, the researchers developed a framework comprising mechanisms motivated by human affect -- one that motivates agents by drives like delight. Using a computer vision system that models the reward and another system that uses data to solve multiple tasks, it measures human smiles as positive affect. The framework encourages agents to explore virtual or real-world environments without getting into perilous situations, and it has the advantage of being agnostic to any specific machine intelligence application. A positive intrinsic reward mechanism predicts human smile responses as the exploration evolves, while a sequential decision-making framework learns a generalizable policy. As for the positive intrinsic affect model, it changes the action selection such that it biases actions providing better intrinsic rewards, and a final component uses data collected during the agent's exploration to build representations for visual recognition and understanding tasks.
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Microsoft Proposes AI That Improves When You Smile More

Microsoft Proposes AI That Improves When You Smile

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  • smile, or smirk? (Score:3)

    by at10u8 ( 179705 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2020 @01:51AM (#59575558)
    Better not train it on me, because I'm going to be smirking at all the stupid things it does.
  • So the new artificial scarcity will be politeness from machines?

  • But (Score:2)

    by rossdee ( 243626 )

    First they have to figure iut how to improve the AI

  • AI does not need to experience happiness, sadness, or even satisfaction with its work. Why on Earth would you want to give it such capability?

    Why do I want a pair of scissors that can be happy or sad? Should we make scissors that can get bored when you don't use them?

    AI programmers are idiots who want to anthropomorphize every fucking thing. Fuck your Clippy, idiots.

    • Re:This is stupid (Score:5, Funny)

      by Aighearach ( 97333 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2020 @03:35AM (#59575694)

      Make the scissors happy, Johnny. You remember what happened last time, when the scissors were sad.

    • "Hey there Grouchypants, Clippy can see you've got a big frowny face. What's wrong, does this excel chart have you down? Well you know, management says that a happy employee is a productive member of our corporate family, so if you could turn that frown upside down and show Clippy those sparkling pearly whites, I'll bet it would brighten up everybody's day and I could help auto-fill these columns a bit better. What do you say there Employee #185, can ya' give me a smile?"

      This is how the Butlerian Jihad

    • "AI does not need to experience happiness, sadness, or even satisfaction with its work. Why on Earth would you want to give it such capability?"

      They can't build an AI scientist yet, but for a standup comedian it's enough.

    • F--- your clippy, idiots

      We have just found our winner, gents: nothing says Welcome your AI overlords, and the horse they rode in on quite like our articulate poster above.

    • Re:This is stupid (Score:4, Interesting)

      by fibonacci8 ( 260615 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2020 @09:16AM (#59575928)
      This is false, and Robert Heinlein's book "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" offers a fine example:
      The AI in the book decides to tack a large number of extra digits onto a janitor's paycheck as a joke. A technician is called in, he discovers the source of the joke, and then offers to teach jokes to the AI to correct the problem. This results in the AI learning that some thing are funny once, some things are not funny at all, and yet other things are decreasing amounts of funny by repetition. Shortly after, the AI begins additional training with another character in the book and learns that the set is not identical for all users.

      It's quite valuable to give real emotional feedback to train an AI that A) some things have diminishing returns, B) some results are user specific, and C) there's no way to guess these correctly in advance.

      A pair of scissors that can smile isn't particularly valuable, but a pair of scissors that could be fine tuned to work better when smiled at would be potentially useful.

      If a scowl is sufficient to get rid of Clippy, they've added value to the product.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by rtb61 ( 674572 )

      Technically most reasonable people, want an emotionless, clean, invisible delivery of service ie the plate of properly prepared food arrives no fanfare. Egotistic freaks want the servants so fuck them, why serve them at all. So an emotionless automated kitchen, your provide the raw ingrediants and it prepares the cooked food and you pick it up at the counter when it is ready or have a simple remote simple bot on wheels run it out to you and you pick it up off it's top and drop the dirty dishes there when fi

  • Is the goal of the personality disordered. It maybe unwise to teach AI how to create personality disorders.

  • Can't wait for the first application that requires you to smile or it won't let you log in.

  • ...welcome our new pizza-bringing sexbot overlords!

  • Russia (Score:3)

    by SimonInOz ( 579741 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2020 @04:35AM (#59575748)

    This definitely won’t work in Russia.

    • Let me guess... in Russia AI smiles at you?

      • in Russia AI smiles at you

        All I can see is a poster of the Joker with the heading, "Big Brother is Watching" and at the bottom, "Why so Serious?".

    • ...he's in his late 50s, served in the Russian special forces and is now an awesome software engineer. He moved to the US in the late 80s and now he's Americanized enough that when he goes back home, people (including his own relatives) think he's a crazy person because he got used to smiling how Americans smile. Apparently many cultures don't smile politely the way we do.

      In Russia, they think you're mentally ill if you're not smiling for some clear reason...seems to be correct from the 100s or so I ha

  • Submit to your AI overlords with a smile (Score:3)

    by De_Boswachter ( 905895 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2020 @07:17AM (#59575832) Homepage
    Because of this, smiling will lose its original meaning as an utterance of plasure and content. It will from here on be a gesture of dissatisfaction, plea and subservience. Thanks, Microsoft.
  • Speech problems Problems lifting both arms equally One side of face drooping AI suddenly being a dick to you
  • ... for implementing AI-controlled rewards to effect subconscious operant conditioning of subjects to increase smile responses.

  • Note: Not when you are happy! When you smile! (Score:3)

    by BAReFO0t ( 6240524 ) on Wednesday January 01, 2020 @10:45AM (#59576028)

    So be a good psychopath, and don the most realistic smile, and you'll be accepted by The Society Of Psycopaths. Then you can stay being a dick all day, because this society is fake fakety fake as fuckin fake as it can be.

    Don't ever try to have a real(istic) mood that fits your dire situation. Besides, it is't /dire/. It is minushappy! Doubleminushappy! So happy! So what do you complain about, negative nanny? Back to work!

    • Something happened that hurt you badly. I'm sorry about whatever it was, it was unfair and wrong. I hope you get better.
    • When management at Mickeysoft has to keep resetting there upgrade now popup, power settings, disabled tasks, sound mixer levels, etc, then I'll smile. Until then I hope he chokes on a cheese burger inserted rectally.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • So, as I am murdering someone, just smile at my Alexa?

  • ...many of the responses to this post have alluded to one simple fact about people's facial expressions: They don't tell anyone how we're actually feeling in any consistent or reliable way. Human feelings are frustratingly complex & evasive to study & to make matters worse, too much of research in psychology & the social sciences relies heavily on self-reporting, i.e. subjects telling researchers how they are or were feeling.

    We don't have a valid, reliable conceptual model of how human feelings

  • Forcing someone to be what they're not doesn't justify anything. Behavioral modification turns everyone into the plastic devices they refuse to put down and walk away from. The lack of true empathy removes the last vestiges of humanity that remain.

    AI controlled robots ( and they are coming ), will misinterpret facial expressions because not everyone is happy all the time.
  • Everyone complains I don't smile or emote enough as it is. To be honest, few people read me well...even world-class salesmen (I have a few in the extended family) or psychologists or even my wife (my kids are good at it, though). I've gotten used to explaining in depth my emotions and feelings and it always surprises me how surprised others are when they find out the "correct answer." Body language is not consistent and I am skeptical AI can't figure out a varied group of people better than those who ear
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Have you taken your Prozac today, Johnny ? We can't have you giving off that negative vibe. Allow me to call the house-drones to make sure you are well-medicated, thoughtless and SMILE ... leave it to microsoft ... this means they are tracking your face expressions AS WELL as your panties then ?

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