Artificial intelligence is no longer a surprise to anyone. But in science fiction movies, we see intelligent machines as real people endowed with emotions, not just thousands of lines on a computer screen that represent the thinking of a machine. When will artificial intelligence finally take on a face?
Researchers at the University of Auckland's Animation Technology Laboratory in New Zealand have tried to combine advanced neural network AI with the appearance of a little girl. The project was named Baby X, and currently the third software version of this interesting experiment is being tested.
Baby X is an interactive animated model of a little girl. Her behavior is completely controlled by special psychobiological algorithms that have been developed by the laboratory staff. In fact, we have before us a full-fledged little child, able to rejoice, be sad, be interested in new things and fully express his emotions on the monitor screen.
This child sees the world around him with the help of a camera built into the computer and hears it with a microphone. In real time, a little girl is able to react to familiar words and associate them with certain objects, actions or images. We can say that Baby X learns in the same way as real children at her age.
Baby X is a virtual, self-taught child
The model of the child is controlled by a very advanced AI based on biological neural networks, due to which the behavior of the virtual character quite accurately repeats the behavior of a person. The girl is able to be distracted during the learning process, to stare at objects of interest to her and have fun if she sees something funny from her point of view. This greatly distinguishes the project from other modern developments in the field of artificial intelligence.
Baby X is just one of the many projects being developed at the New Zealand laboratory. Researchers are constantly improving the animation of human faces, developing technology for image recognition and human facial expressions, and also working in parallel on many other equally interesting tasks.
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In the video below, you can see what Baby X is in action, as well as what the process of learning and pattern recognition looks like with artificial intelligence. I would like to warn you right away that if you are reading the news from an Android device, the video will most likely not be displayed for you, since it is posted on the Vimeo.com portal. However, you can always watch the video using your personal computer or from an iOS device.