5 Weird AI applications
Sylwia Zabłocka
Marketing Specialist
January 31st, 2019
From fear, confusion, and anxiety to fascination and excitement. Artificial Intelligence raises many emotions.
Since we mostly write about the practical, technological side of it, this time we want to show you uncanny AI inventions. These are just a couple examples of some non-typical AI solutions.
Don’t look for Waldo – THEY already found him
Remember magazines with illustrations of a crowd on which you had to recognize him – a man wearing a striped shirt? Lot of us had a lot of fun, trying to concentrate and separate details on the complicated picture.
In the second decade of the XXI century, one robot decided to take all your joy coming from this activity. His arm made of metal and silicone can find Waldo quicker than you and point where is he with surprising accuracy.
All of this happens through Google’s Cloud AutoML and implemented image recognition techniques. It was trained by showing plenty of Waldo’s illustration.
See how this killjoy works:
Love in the age of technology
What if a neural network would deliver you a love message? Straight from its “heart” (which are algorithms in this case).
AI fed with random messages on candy hearts, generated its content for Valentine’s Day. The final results included texts like “Dear me”, “Love bot” or “Am good”. Very diversified. Sometimes weird. Sometimes confusing and disturbing.
Uncanny valley (creepy robot stuff)
Ever heard of the uncanny valley? You might need to get to know this phrase cause you will probably experience this feeling more and more often.
In short, it’s this weird reaction in contact with something artificial which seems oddly seems to be alive. And then you suddenly find out that it’s not. It can happen, for example, when you see prosthetic arm thinking that it’s living flesh.
And then you touch it, and it turns out to be cold material.
This phenomenon we can also notice in the news. Remember Sophia – the robot which got citizenship? She’s one of robotic AI inventions giving a lot of people chills.
One of them is also a spider-like robot, crawling in a surprisingly realistic way. Its name is HEXA, and it’s used as a “platform to learn and explore robotics”:
Artificial artists
Another uncanny area using AI is art.
AttN:GAN (currently not available anymore) created images from the text you could put in the software. Results were very abstract and somewhat disturbing. You can check examples like “a picture of a man wearing a tie” (it’s neither of it) or “a perfectly normal human body” here.
My impressions? Francis Bacon would be proud.
AI is still a mystery
As can be seen in these couple examples, AI market can sometimes bring odd ideas.
Sometimes funny (or just weird) projects are like this on purpose. Sometimes they fail, and something unexpected happens. And sometimes it’s just for fun.
