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Kara Is Self-Aware
- jheimark 15y agoThe face musculature is incredible. But so is the writing and direction of the piece.
- Splines 15y agoIndeed. The music was done well too, IMO. If you had the same crew apply their technology to the "Hotel Hospital" video[1], it'd be pretty uninteresting. I'd be willing to watch more of this story even if were animated like Reboot[2]. [1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-u4304UWwU http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-u4304UWwU [2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBjWCT4NPHI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WBjWCT4NPHI
- queensnake 15y agoYeah there aren't many stories about the first self-aware robots. Robopocalypse and Short-Circuit but, to me it's surprisingly un-explored. Maybe because it's hard.
- hastur 15y agoWell, a great idea, but I don't agree that they've crossed the "uncanny valley". Quite far from it.
- mistercow 15y agoReally? I was completely undistracted by the fact that I was watching CG. Obviously I was not fooled into thinking that I was watching live action, but that's not what it means to cross the uncanny valley. The point is that you are able to focus on the emotions and expressions of the character you're watching rather than struggling against an urge to warn the others... to protect the children.
- icebraining 15y agoThe point is that you are able to focus on the emotions and expressions of the character you're watching rather than struggling against an urge to warn the others... to protect the children. But that can happen after or before the valley, and I personally think they're still before it. It's closer to a cartoon or animated being like Wall-E than to a real human.
- elisee 15y agoThe Uncally valley has to do with causing "a response of revulsion among human observers" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny_valley). It's when the robot / fictional character feels real enough that it's not obvious it's a robot anymore, but weird enough that it looks like a real creepy human being. The rendering being cartoon-like or the shading not being realistic has nothing to do with it.
- icebraining 15y agoHow does it not have anything to do with it? To me, it's exactly the cartoon-like appearance that makes it feel unreal enough that it's obvious it's not an human.
- bh42222 15y agoIt is very creepy to me and I happen to have a very hard time remember people's faces and recognizing them. I wonder if my brain is just worse than average at face processing, and that's why this becomes uncanny to me? Whereas to someone who has a better than average eye for faces, this is clearly a cartoon.
- andywood 15y agoFrom the Wikipedia article you linked: "Avoiding a photorealistic texture can permit more leeway." For me, this goes nowhere near the uncanny valley, for the reason icebraining points out. The coloring and visual tone of the whole piece says "cartoon" to me. It's a different aesthetic than, say, Tangled, but the effect is the same for me. Perhaps this is partly because, as a frequent gamer, that aesthetic is very familiar to me.
- dkersten 15y agoThe fact that the character was an android rather than a human made it easy for me to forget that it was CG because I expect an android to be somewhat artificial looking or acting. If they had shown a human character, I imagine the effect would have been less dramatic.
- stonemetal 15y agoReally I was expecting more from a tech demo. The quality felt about the same but a little better than Mass Effect or the last Deus Ex.
- extension 15y agoIf the CG doesn't make you squirm then the subject matter will, so it may not have been the best choice for demonstrating the absence of revulsion.
- tibbon 15y agoThat is very impressive. After Heavy Rain, I've been rather let down feeling by other modern games that frankly just weren't keeping with the pace for getting people 'right'. Skyrim was leaps over Oblivion, but still the people could be best described as 'weird' looking. Mass Effect 2 (haven't played 3 yet, but graphically it doesnt look much better) had some really nice looking face stuff sometimes and then super awkward other times- as if the QA team wasn't paying attending to that type of detail. I look forward to the day that we can combine Dwarf Fortress style AI and personality with Kara-like visuals. Now i just hope my console doesn't 'wake up'.
- dpcx 15y agoLA Noire actually did people pretty well, since they depend on the facial expressions to step through the game. I was blown away by how "correct" the mouth movements were for speaking.
- tibbon 15y agoLA Noire was pretty good- most of the time. The game was awkward in other ways for me, but a good experience overall. I haven't played it in a while, but I remember my main complaints being that I didn't care about my character at all (story about 'you' moved far too slowly), and that somehow they managed to make driving in a game using the GTA engine un-fun and exploration generally uninteresting. But on the topic, the face stuff in the game was relatively good- but kinda smacked the valley a bit at times as it felt that everything had to be over-acted like a bad play.
- dclowd9901 15y agoI think the awkwardness was on the part of the actors themselves. The capture of the slight movement cues were incredible to witness.
- mcantelon 15y agoCheesy ending.
- hieronymusN 15y agoNice to know that Chris Cunningham and Bjork are still influencing a generation of sci-fi designers. http://youtu.be/wxBO28j3vug http://youtu.be/wxBO28j3vug
- andos 15y agoAll is Full of Love is probably the most amazing music video I have ever seen. The lens flares in the end of Kara leave no doubt that this is a huge nod to Björk.
- bh42222 15y agoI'm pretty sure Ghost in the Shell, and it's assembly sequence came long before All is Full of Love. And I am sure there was even earlier stuff. Chris Cunningham is absolutely brilliant but I don't see the direct connection to that particular video.
- andos 15y agoWow, the mise-en-scène is almost identical: blurry introduction, hospital-like environment, lots of lens flares, multiple mechanical arms assembling Kara from parts, welding sparks, and Kara being awake during assembly. If Kara refers to the GitS intro, it does so indirectly, through All is Full of Love.
- JVIDEL 15y agoNice graphics, although the 7900 GPU on the PS3 is really showing its age, they should've used a current highend unit and just say it's a PS4 tech demo.
- justjimmy 15y agoI actually panicked when 'it' was being disassembled. And the smile and 'Thanks' at the end? Unsettling…yet excited and curious about the unknown. I wonder if AI self awareness would actually happen in my life time.
- obilgic 15y agoI was expecting guy to say "final check is complete", when she was leaving ;).
- chime 15y agoThat would have made this utterly brilliant and changed the entire meaning of the clip. Or maybe it was subtly implied.
- djtriptych 15y agoI vote subtly implied. The disassembly stopped at the exact point she expressed she was frightened. The "My God" at the end I interpreted as "we've done it", as in created self-aware AI with a survival instinct. The other explanation, that a single operator has the authority to release a one-off self-aware super-being into the wild without considering the implications of such a decision and without oversight feels harder to swallow.
- chapel 15y agoWhy I agree it is harder to swallow, it is most likely what they intended. This was purely an emotional play, they did this to try and pull some heart strings in an unconventional way. The setting is really just a backdrop. If they make a game out of it, I would almost assure you that the latter is what was intended, and sadly the story will go through the rabbit hole because of it.
- obilgic 15y agoI was at least waiting them to imply it somehow too, but she was obviously different from others when she was in the box. idk
- queensnake 15y agoThat's a good theory except, that you wouldn't want a creature with self-respect etc being treated as merchanise; she says she'll comply but, at least in humans, that resolution wouldn't last forever. No, I vote for the demo being incoherent, "enh, get it done, it's just a demo". But, they say the demo was made a year ago and that they've made much progress since - why not incorporate the new stuff? Grrr.
- kwamenum86 15y agoI'd watch that movie. The CG wasn't perfect but it was far from zombie-like. The primary problems were subtle stiffness here and there and a feeling that the words were being lip-synced at certain moments.
- folktheory 15y agoIt's a video game, not a movie.
- kwamenum86 15y agoYeah...I know. I'm just saying I found it deeply engaging and if they made a movie out of it I'd watch it.
- scott_s 15y agoIt's neither. It's a tech-demo. A tech-demo with a well written and well acted story, but still a tech-demo.
- boredguy8 15y ago"'There were 90 markers on her face, and an equivalent amount on her body,' said Cage. 'She delivered the performance in one take.'" Neal Stephenson, popularizer/coiner of the term "avatar" to refer to online bodies, seems to have nailed this one, too. Can we just start calling them "'sites" now? Fred Epidermis had put the stage into Constellation Mode. Miranda was looking at a black wall speckled with twenty or thirty thousand individual pricks of white light. Taken together, they formed a sort of three-dimensional constellation of Miranda, moving as she moved. Each point of light marked one of the 'sites that had been poked into her skin by the tat machine during those sixteen hours. Not shown were the filaments that tied them all together into a network— a new bodily system overlaid and interlaced with the nervous, lymph, and vascular systems. ... Outside, Fred Epidermis was wielding the editing controls, zooming in on her face, which was dense as a galactic core. By comparison, her arms and legs were wispy nebulas and the back of her head nearly invisible, with a grand total of maybe a hundred 'sites placed around her scalp like the vertices of a geodesic dome. The eyes were empty holes, except (she imagined) when she closed her eyes. Just to check it out, she winked into the mediatron. The 'sites on her eyelids were dense as grass blades on a putting green, but accordioned together except when the lid expanded over the eye. Perhaps the only thing he got "wrong" was that we might not need a stage. A kinect-like system might be enough to monitor and render the shifting systems from your very own living room.
- VikingCoder 15y ago...why use 90 markers? I saw a demo a while ago where they used Infrared makeup on someone, and used a sponge to make it really splotchy. The makeup doesn't show up in Red, Green, Blue wavelengths. So, they could simultaneously capture RGB, and IR. Using multiple cameras on the IR, and the splotchy makeup, they were able to capture thousands and thousands of points, and get color info at the same time. Seems like the right approach to me. I could totally see a Kinnect-like device taking advantage of this, allowing someone to do facial capture like this at home.
- BGyss 15y agoThere already are a few papers on Kinect-based 3D face reconstruction (most of them seem to be behind paywalls though). Here's a video: http://youtu.be/nYsqNnDA1l4 http://youtu.be/nYsqNnDA1l4 The infrared makeup (pretty sure the only company that kinda pursued that path was Mova) was kind of unwieldy and it's kind of fallen out of use already. Most facial capture in the future will probably just utilize some kind of depth capture (light field, structured light) in concert with a normal witness camera to reconstruct facial features.
- hexagonc 15y agoFrom the summary, I thought the article was about a real computer ai that could pass the Turing test or recognize its appearance in a mirror. This was a tech demo about motion capture and CG in video games. Extremely impressive but nothing to do with ai.
- mindstab 15y agoDid anyone else find the whole scene unrealistic and creepy in the not good way. How do such simple assembly errors give rise to self consciousness in the program seconds after turn on, compared to slave mode unconsciousness that was desired and usually occurred? And the whole power play dynamic, geeky lazy sounding guy, desperate sex bot about to be erased. The whole unrealistic setup feels uncomfortably like some male sex fantasy... save the self aware sexbot's life, then the sex with her isn't guilty because she's aware and her consent means something? But the power balance is so off, he controls her life, she's... grateful? That's not a good start. And she'll be at this disadvantage everywhere. Anyone could turn her in. She's extremely vulnerable in this world apparently. She has no rights. I guess seeing conscious life forms with as much rights as my toaster doesn't thrill me. Especially when they are clearly sexualized as such Would anyone else have an easier time sharing my creepiness if: - the robot had been a little boy for sex purposes? I found the dynamic unlikely and if we reach a world where we can accidentally give AI consciousness and we still haven't gotten the artificial civil rights movement off the ground... Ooph.
- Confusion 15y ago1) It's a technology demo, not a hard, possible future, SciFi story. I could equally well argue it's an awful vampire story. 2) What convinced you she was actually conscious? The entire "please don't shut me down" can be part of a program. RealDolls are fine, mechanized RealDolls are fine, but as soon as they start resembling humans too much to your untrained eye, they must get rights?
- lolcraft 15y ago> RealDolls are fine, mechanized RealDolls are fine, but as soon as they start resembling humans too much to your untrained eye, they must get rights? Yes. That's the point of Turing's test.
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- zerostar07 15y ago
- kirubakaran 15y agoI am shocked at how bad I feel for "her". Why do I feel so much empathy for a few thousand pixels that just represent a machine that hasn't even been built yet! Even knowing that, I feel the same, as if she is a real person with emotions. Her expression on hearing her name is just amazing.
- Confusion 15y agoBecause she was voiced by a human that expressed emotion through her voice. You would feel equally bad if you only heard this clip.
- thatsright 15y agoThat's right. The emotion comes from a human.
- jerf 15y agoYes, this is it. We have very uneven abilities to make things look extraordinarily good with computers while our abilities on some other fronts have hardly progressed at all in the past 20 years, while others have had much more believable curves. Speech synthesis, for instance, is terrible by this standard. We have absolutely no ability to synthesize this voice with a specification much smaller than someone feeding it a full voice performance anyhow. Personally I think it's a grave error to measure our progress on these fronts by getting distracted by the glitzy graphics... we are sooooo much better at those than anything else that they provide a very skewed view of where we are. You can see the same effect in video games; graphics that are orders of magnitude better than ten years ago, game engines themselves are only incrementally better in terms of capabilities and games themselves only incrementally more complicated. (And to be clear, I'm not saying we have made significant progress in a wide variety of fields, because we have. I'm saying measuring our general progress by the subfield that has been an extreme outlier doesn't give a good view of that progress.)
- jannes 15y agoSo you think this clip wouldn't raise human emotions if it were subtitled, without the voice acting (i.e. background music only)? I'm not entirely sure about that.
- shmageggy 15y agoKara even comes with built in autotune!
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- joering2 15y agoat 3:30 when he said "capable of doing all sort of things" - what was your first thought??
- ww520 15y agoI think it will take a long time for normal AI to progress to the point of self-aware. The leap of progress in AI will probably via alternative route, such as cyborg tech. It's too complicate to build an AI from scratch; however, human brain has evolved beautifully. It is not inconceivable to scan a brain's interconnectivity to "upload" its entirety into a vast computer. The circuitry of the brain (neural net) can be simulated and run the upload image. The "electronic brain" cyborgic AI can become self aware easily. The basic mechanic of the circuitry of the brain is relatively easier to understand, neurons and synapses. It's the vast connectivity that's difficult to understand. Scanning a live brain short-circuits the problem.
- satori99 15y agoThis reminds me very much of Saturn's Children, by Charles Stross. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn%27s_Children_%28Stross_novel%29 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn%27s_Children_%28Stross_n... A story about a sex-bot built in the same year that the last human dies.
- blhack 15y agoMaybe this is me being a Luddite, but...what the hell is the point of this? So you had a "real" actress mimic the facial expressions of this scene...then mapped them onto an obviously fake render of the same person? Why not just skip all of this and have live action actors perform this scene? What is gained by rendering the same thing in a computer other than appealing to some strange nerd fantasy? I guess I'm also not a video game player, so maybe somebody can enlighten me here: are the graphics here really better than what we were seeing 5-6 years ago? Yeah...I guess we can render it in real time (AWESOME FEAT!), but if you want to show off the computational ability of Cell, have it calculate pi or simulate a dust cloud or something. This, at least to me, looks identical to every other video game trailer I've seen for the last 5 years. If you would have said this was a trailer for half life in 2005 (the dates here may be totally wrong, I have no idea when that game came out), I wouldn't have questioned it at all. --- As for the story here. This is shallow, boring, and lazy. It's like we're being slapped in the face with whatever the storyteller wants us to feel. The obnoxious "honey" or "baby" or whatever the operator says to the robot is just...uhgg, painfully awkward. /or maybe I just need more coffee this morning
- Tossrock 15y agoThe graphics are much, much better than something from 2005. For reference, here's a screenshot from a well-regarded 2005 console game: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/82/Gun_Showdown.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/8/82/Gun_Showdown.j... Especially for the PS3 hardware, the polygon count, lighting solution and facial animation are quite impressive. While this isn't a game but a tech demo, it's still impressive for what it is. I don't see how calculating digits of pi is a more worthy way to demonstrate the capabilities of hardware specifically designed to render 3D scenes than actually rendering a 3D scene.
- blhack 15y agoYes, but this is a cutscene isn't it? One of the major points was that they had an actress mimic the facial expressions (and used motion capture for it), and voice actors to "act" the scene. That doesn't translate to gameplay.
- zoba 15y agoThe AI pleading for its life, in a very convincing way, seems like something that could occur by a very intelligent AI attempting to manipulate humans... I imagine an AI could be able to give all the right body language, intonation, etc cues to manipulate humans much better than current humans can. Theres no telling what she is going to do now, because all we currently know is she is good at manipulating a man into not killing her.
- bdunbar 15y agoKara Is Self-Aware It's a game. Pity. I thought the long AI winter was over.
- newman314 15y agoI find the transition to being clothed fascinating from the standpoint where the android is now humanized and depicted with sexual attributes vs. the assembly phase where components are still relatively asexual. For me, that was a definite "ugh" moment. There is a general sense of awkwardness and discomfort from both the speech and visual depiction but I think this is deliberate in a sense how an android goes from being an abstract head to a human like representation complete with emotions, motion and self-awareness.
- Terretta 15y agoMeanwhile, what I thought was, "Oh, this is where they censor it for YouTube." Which, now that you mention it, is the same thing you're saying.
- CamperBob 15y agoWhat would've been even creepier: "Fight/flight response, check. Reattach components. OK, this one's good to go."
- lizzard 15y ago"I can look after your house, do the cooking, mind the children".... seriously? Seriously sexist and creepy. Liberate the robots! Overthrow the slave owner "human" class!
- lizzard 15y agoWhy does the assembly tester guy even have a job? A robot could have asked her the same questions.
- narrator 15y ago10 print "I want to live, I'm begging you!" 20 goto 10 So if I type that into a Commodore 64 and hit "Run" do I have a sentient computer?
- theon144 15y agoDoes anybody have the video for download? It's unwatchable in the flash player, I get about 5 FPS.
- sktrdie 15y agoI would love for this story to continue and become a movie.
- zerostar07 15y agoThe whole sci-fi view of AI seems to alwaysbe about emotions, while in fact most AI systems don't have an emotional system, and it's not the most researched subfield therein. It doesn't even seem necessary for a robot to have survival and reproduction needs that would require basic emotions and drives. While emotionsl are good dramatic fodder, it is far from what AI is about.
- wizard_2 15y agoIf you ever played Quantic Dream's Heavy Rain you'll see where this story came from. (Also if you read the article you'll see its also inspired by Ray Kurzweil's The Singularity.) Heavy Rain was a dark and gritty detective story with situations a lot more messed up then sex robots. Someone here was disturbed that the writers of this video came up with this story. That's the point, not every story is going to make you feel happy.
- rsanchez1 15y agoI like how they gave it a heartbeat, while modern artificial heart pump designs without a beat are looking more practical. Maybe the heartbeat helps in the suspension of disbelief in the robot's line of work.