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Things are going to get really weird in the next decade or two. Right now AI is able to "communicate" with us mostly via text, and indirectly via algorithms. W

by uses 6y ago

Things are going to get really weird in the next decade or two. Right now AI is able to "communicate" with us mostly via text, and indirectly via algorithms. With human-like agents that have human-like voices, appearances, and mannerisms, they'll be able to communicate with millions of average Joes, and all in a way particular to that specific Joe. AI being able to do infinite amounts of "ambient work" and expose us to the results via human-like entities makes for a very different world of possibilities. And right now the big AIs that most people directly interface with are clumsy and abstract, but they're also tied in the backend to large pools of closed data owned by mostly well-meaning entities. But how will things change when and if the AI Joe interacts with isn't directed and contained by wealthy US-based corporations?

jimsmart 6y ago
You might be interested in the work of Soul Machines [0] (online demo on website), a company formed by Mark Sagar [1][2]. There are a few interesting talks by him if you search on Youtube. Their AI-driven avatars are already in use in a handful of places, and fairly well received. "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." — Appearance-wise, I think MetaHuman's stuff looks better than Soul Machines' — but SM's avatars are backed with a conversational AI, and are not available as a UE-plugin. So it's not an apples-for-apples comparison of course. [0] https://www.soulmachines.com https://www.soulmachines.com [1] https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/engineering/community-engagement/alumni/alumni-stories/mark-sagar.html https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/engineering/community-engageme... [2] https://www.ibm.com/watson/advantage-reports/future-of-artificial-intelligence/mark-sagar.html https://www.ibm.com/watson/advantage-reports/future-of-artif...
- suyash 6y ago
  nice, this is going to become a commodity technology in few years. I can see Unity following and then so many other 3d design tool makers with similar capabilities.
olooney 6y ago
Chloe, the digital avatar on the menu of the video game Detroit: Becoming Human is sort of a sneak peak into what that might be like. (Potential spoilers! Chloe has her own story line, and if you want to experience that, don't watch the whole video.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNTUhKs_xwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNTUhKs_xwQ
ianbicking 6y ago
I'm really confused about what we (as humans) really want. Here's this incredible technology to make human features, and video games already have excellent technology, yet the entities in video games don't _act_ like humans. It's like an incredible holographic cardboard cutout. The characters don't act like aliens either! They are just backdrops with scripted cut scenes. I don't feel like this is an accident. But I don't know what to think of it, I'm still a bit confused about what we're really trying to get out of these facsimiles.
- thecupisblue 6y ago
  What we (as humans) want is safety and company. What are we going to get out of it? An ad inside your game that is a male/female/whatever of your preferred attributes selling you things with a seductive voice. Or a company selling that avatar to you as a in-game companion/skin. Or propagating services through that avatar. Looking here, it fits into TenCent masterplan. Sell an avatar/avatars to users as companions. Add it to snapchat - see it in AR!. Let it read a spotify audibook to you! Buy it clothes and skins, play with it in Fortnite or Roblox! Imagine all the possibilities of upselling, crosselling and overselling virtually generated items (your only cost is data and electricity - potential unlimited) for virtual characters that people will start to feel emotional ties to since they'll grow up surrounded with them or to fill an emotional void left by lack of socialisation.
- sbierwagen 6y ago
  >yet the entities in video games don't _act_ like humans This was the source of a lot of complaints about Cyberpunk 2077. They made a lavishly detailed world, but it was all a millimeter of paint over nothing. Food stalls that don't sell food, cars that disappear when you're not looking at them. As it turns out, graphics are a lot easier than behavior! We should have guessed this, but while you can see all the complicated visual detail that should be hard to replicate, behavior is invisible. Shamus Young had a good post drilling allllll the way down into the nitty gritty details in one small AI subsystem of a game, Thief 3, and what it would mean to upgrade it: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=270 https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=270 >In the game, you can sneak up on anyone (servants, nobility, or guards) and whack them on the back of the head to knock them out. (You can also stab someone in the back, but that’s noisy and bloody, and why kill them when you can just knock them out?) Once they are knocked out, you usually need to hide them. If you leave them laying in the middle of the room or hallway, someone else is likely to come along and discover your work. When this happens, they always assume the victim is dead. Then they start with the running and the screaming and everyone searching for you. >This can be amusing. I was in a large manor, working my way through a sleeping area for servants. One of them was already asleep in the bunk beds, but a few others were still wandering around. I zonked one of them and placed the sleeping victim into one of the beds. I thought I was being clever. Another servant came in, saw their compatriot in the bed and exclaimed, “Dead!? But who could have killed him? I’ll go tell the guards!” Then he ran off. >Blast it all. >I should have known better. The AI was just looking for knocked-out people. It didn’t care where the body was. I was so into the game I stopped the metagame thinking about AI and started thinking about what I’d do in the given situation. In that situation, placing a zonked person in a bed made a lot more sense than dumping them in a corner. However, to the AI it was just a poorly hidden body. Sigh. >But fixing this problem would be tricky, and would involve a lot of extra work. The level designers would have to designate certain areas or objects as “beds”, and the programmers would need to make it so that bodies laying on beds rouse less suspicion than bodies found elsewhere. Then they would need to add some new dialog and behavior: If an NPC sees someone “sleeping” on a bed (most likely not in their own bed) while fully clothed and while they should be working, he shouldn’t ignore them, but he also shouldn’t run away screaming about murders and dead bodies. You need some new behavior along the lines of “try to wake someone up and then discover they have been knocked out”. >But even with that extra effort, you can still have some amusing failure modes. Placing a servant girl on a bed in the priest’s quarters or the barracks should raise some eyebrows. Likewise, stacking two or more people in the same bed should tip off guards and servants that something is amiss. It wouldn’t make sense for them to just assume they all decided to take a nap together. >It would be annoying to code in such a way that it works right. The programmer would probably need to take the victim’s position into account as well. If I just toss somebody on the bed so that their upper body hangs over the side and their head is resting on the floor, it’s going to look pretty stupid if someone comes along and assumes they’re asleep. >Also, it seems like the length of time since the NPC’s last saw each other should be taken into account as well. If you greet your fellow housekeeper, walk out of the room, and come back a few seconds later to find them motionless in someone else’s bed, you are not going to think they are sleeping. And that's just one tiny detail, resulting in a vast increase of work. Our old friend, the combinatorial explosion. A goomba in Super Mario Brothers just walks back and forth. A couple lines of code. Doing better than that is not ten times harder, it's millions of times harder! Who would pay tens of thousands of AI programmers for a decade to make a version of Cyperpunk 2077 where each noodle vendor had a name, a home, a routine, a simulated economy... If you could do it, which you can't, it would an incredible shining gem of technical achievement... but would it make the game more interesting to play? Spend a thousand times as much to make the game 1.4 times more interesting?
tootie 6y ago
I don't see how animated faces brings anything to the table aside from novelty factor. People are already plenty comfortable communication with just voice and text. Faces can help with rapport, but if you know if it's a machine, why would you care. The biggest value here will be in entertainment (movies and games) or deception.
- cma 6y ago
  >but if you know if it's a machine, why would you care. It won't be a machine in all cases. You have recorded stuff from mo-cap stages and maybe somehow you consider that a machine you don't care about but would care about a movie (not sure why the distinction?). But aside from that, VR headsets are also getting mouth cameras and eye tracking cameras that can track facial expressions. You can also facetrack from things like an iphone with face id while playing a game in 2D.
- dbish 6y ago
  This (and tech like it) will be used for real time streaming and chatting, and we'll see a sharp increase in the number of virtual streamers/youtubers/etc. as well. Some may be run by teams, some a single person, these virtual personas are getting easier and easier to make now, and more realistic as we see with this new service.

by uses 6y ago

jimsmart 6y ago

You might be interested in the work of Soul Machines [0] (online demo on website), a company formed by Mark Sagar [1][2]. There are a few interesting talks by him if you search on Youtube. Their AI-driven avatars are already in use in a handful of places, and fairly well received. "The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed." — Appearance-wise, I think MetaHuman's stuff looks better than Soul Machines' — but SM's avatars are backed with a conversational AI, and are not available as a UE-plugin. So it's not an apples-for-apples comparison of course. [0] https://www.soulmachines.com https://www.soulmachines.com [1] https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/engineering/community-engagement/alumni/alumni-stories/mark-sagar.html https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/engineering/community-engageme... [2] https://www.ibm.com/watson/advantage-reports/future-of-artificial-intelligence/mark-sagar.html https://www.ibm.com/watson/advantage-reports/future-of-artif...

suyash 6y ago
nice, this is going to become a commodity technology in few years. I can see Unity following and then so many other 3d design tool makers with similar capabilities.

olooney 6y ago

Chloe, the digital avatar on the menu of the video game Detroit: Becoming Human is sort of a sneak peak into what that might be like. (Potential spoilers! Chloe has her own story line, and if you want to experience that, don't watch the whole video.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNTUhKs_xwQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eNTUhKs_xwQ

ianbicking 6y ago

I'm really confused about what we (as humans) really want. Here's this incredible technology to make human features, and video games already have excellent technology, yet the entities in video games don't _act_ like humans. It's like an incredible holographic cardboard cutout. The characters don't act like aliens either! They are just backdrops with scripted cut scenes. I don't feel like this is an accident. But I don't know what to think of it, I'm still a bit confused about what we're really trying to get out of these facsimiles.

thecupisblue 6y ago
What we (as humans) want is safety and company. What are we going to get out of it? An ad inside your game that is a male/female/whatever of your preferred attributes selling you things with a seductive voice. Or a company selling that avatar to you as a in-game companion/skin. Or propagating services through that avatar. Looking here, it fits into TenCent masterplan. Sell an avatar/avatars to users as companions. Add it to snapchat - see it in AR!. Let it read a spotify audibook to you! Buy it clothes and skins, play with it in Fortnite or Roblox! Imagine all the possibilities of upselling, crosselling and overselling virtually generated items (your only cost is data and electricity - potential unlimited) for virtual characters that people will start to feel emotional ties to since they'll grow up surrounded with them or to fill an emotional void left by lack of socialisation.
sbierwagen 6y ago
>yet the entities in video games don't _act_ like humans This was the source of a lot of complaints about Cyberpunk 2077. They made a lavishly detailed world, but it was all a millimeter of paint over nothing. Food stalls that don't sell food, cars that disappear when you're not looking at them. As it turns out, graphics are a lot easier than behavior! We should have guessed this, but while you can see all the complicated visual detail that should be hard to replicate, behavior is invisible. Shamus Young had a good post drilling allllll the way down into the nitty gritty details in one small AI subsystem of a game, Thief 3, and what it would mean to upgrade it: https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=270 https://www.shamusyoung.com/twentysidedtale/?p=270 >In the game, you can sneak up on anyone (servants, nobility, or guards) and whack them on the back of the head to knock them out. (You can also stab someone in the back, but that’s noisy and bloody, and why kill them when you can just knock them out?) Once they are knocked out, you usually need to hide them. If you leave them laying in the middle of the room or hallway, someone else is likely to come along and discover your work. When this happens, they always assume the victim is dead. Then they start with the running and the screaming and everyone searching for you. >This can be amusing. I was in a large manor, working my way through a sleeping area for servants. One of them was already asleep in the bunk beds, but a few others were still wandering around. I zonked one of them and placed the sleeping victim into one of the beds. I thought I was being clever. Another servant came in, saw their compatriot in the bed and exclaimed, “Dead!? But who could have killed him? I’ll go tell the guards!” Then he ran off. >Blast it all. >I should have known better. The AI was just looking for knocked-out people. It didn’t care where the body was. I was so into the game I stopped the metagame thinking about AI and started thinking about what I’d do in the given situation. In that situation, placing a zonked person in a bed made a lot more sense than dumping them in a corner. However, to the AI it was just a poorly hidden body. Sigh. >But fixing this problem would be tricky, and would involve a lot of extra work. The level designers would have to designate certain areas or objects as “beds”, and the programmers would need to make it so that bodies laying on beds rouse less suspicion than bodies found elsewhere. Then they would need to add some new dialog and behavior: If an NPC sees someone “sleeping” on a bed (most likely not in their own bed) while fully clothed and while they should be working, he shouldn’t ignore them, but he also shouldn’t run away screaming about murders and dead bodies. You need some new behavior along the lines of “try to wake someone up and then discover they have been knocked out”. >But even with that extra effort, you can still have some amusing failure modes. Placing a servant girl on a bed in the priest’s quarters or the barracks should raise some eyebrows. Likewise, stacking two or more people in the same bed should tip off guards and servants that something is amiss. It wouldn’t make sense for them to just assume they all decided to take a nap together. >It would be annoying to code in such a way that it works right. The programmer would probably need to take the victim’s position into account as well. If I just toss somebody on the bed so that their upper body hangs over the side and their head is resting on the floor, it’s going to look pretty stupid if someone comes along and assumes they’re asleep. >Also, it seems like the length of time since the NPC’s last saw each other should be taken into account as well. If you greet your fellow housekeeper, walk out of the room, and come back a few seconds later to find them motionless in someone else’s bed, you are not going to think they are sleeping. And that's just one tiny detail, resulting in a vast increase of work. Our old friend, the combinatorial explosion. A goomba in Super Mario Brothers just walks back and forth. A couple lines of code. Doing better than that is not ten times harder, it's millions of times harder! Who would pay tens of thousands of AI programmers for a decade to make a version of Cyperpunk 2077 where each noodle vendor had a name, a home, a routine, a simulated economy... If you could do it, which you can't, it would an incredible shining gem of technical achievement... but would it make the game more interesting to play? Spend a thousand times as much to make the game 1.4 times more interesting?

tootie 6y ago

I don't see how animated faces brings anything to the table aside from novelty factor. People are already plenty comfortable communication with just voice and text. Faces can help with rapport, but if you know if it's a machine, why would you care. The biggest value here will be in entertainment (movies and games) or deception.

cma 6y ago
>but if you know if it's a machine, why would you care. It won't be a machine in all cases. You have recorded stuff from mo-cap stages and maybe somehow you consider that a machine you don't care about but would care about a movie (not sure why the distinction?). But aside from that, VR headsets are also getting mouth cameras and eye tracking cameras that can track facial expressions. You can also facetrack from things like an iphone with face id while playing a game in 2D.
dbish 6y ago
This (and tech like it) will be used for real time streaming and chatting, and we'll see a sharp increase in the number of virtual streamers/youtubers/etc. as well. Some may be run by teams, some a single person, these virtual personas are getting easier and easier to make now, and more realistic as we see with this new service.