AI DIY Episode 4 Support Bot

Explicit content warning

01/04/22 • 57 min

Olga Koch is a TV comedian who makes shows about technology and who studies the regulation of the Internet. She wants to make an AI that will reassure you about your worst behaviour, and always present your achievements in the best possible light. Although there isn't an AI product that has your back in that way yet, there are a number of emotional support bots that are being tried out. Moflin is an AI for emotional support - a kind of furry pet robot tamagochi that looks like a tribble. But before it can support you, you'll have to support it on Indiegogo! If you like your robots to be cute then you can go to Japan and buy a Lovot companion robot, aka cuddlebot, that looks like a tellytubby and is designed to create an emotional bond with you. The My Special AFLAC Duck is a social robot that is used to comfort children in hospital.

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AI DIY Episode 3 Roboaudit

Dr Pamela Ugwidike is an expert on the use of AI in justice systems and is particularly interested in how AI and data bias impact criminal justice. She wants to make an AI that can audit other AIs for bias to make sure that all Artificial Intelligence always operates in the interest of humanity. There's currently a huge amount of interest in AI ethics and biases in the research community, and we are discovering many ways in which our

data and our computations can lead to unfairness.

Perhaps the most famous case of AI bias comes from the field of criminal justice. The COMPAS algorithm (used in US courts to predict whether a defendant would go on to reoffend) was twice as likely to incorrectly label black people as reoffenders than white people. While there are lots of advice and programming toolkits aimed at helping human developers to eradicate bias from the AI products that they are building, IBM's Watson OpenScale is the only AI platform that claims to detect and correct biases in its own operation. Although is that just IBM's marketing department being a bit biased?

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AI DIY Episode 5 Musical Director Bot

Professor David De Roure is an expert on using technology to support creativity. A jazz musician, he wants to create an AI that can help you to create a musical soundtrack for your life. Computers and AI have been used as a way to generate "experimental" music for decades, but recently their musical proficiency has become more mainstream with even an AI equivalent of the Eurovision Song Contest! and AI tribute versions of Nirvana. AI's are even being trained to "get" the emotional contrent of songs, something which Spotify wants to take advantage of.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.