AI (Artificial intelligence) learns in many ways, but all of those ways involve continuous data feeding. In one of its efforts to make its apps more reliable and powerful, Google in early May 2016, was feeding its Google Brain AI engine 2,865 romance novels so it can improve its understanding of human language.
The idea here was to improve Google's products in responding to users. Software engineer Andrew Dai who led the project, said that this work could help make the responses from AI more natural and varied.
The challenge here is to make AI in having the colloquial skills that can adapt to, and mimic, the different ways humans converse.
While children's books might seem like a more natural choice to teach AI systems because they use easier to understand languages and phrases, Google in choosing romance novels was for reasons. Some of which were because this type of novel has good amount of conversations and follows similar plot. This would allow the AI to focus on picking up the diversity of a language, and helps AI to understand how language and speech may adapt over a course of time.
Romance novels also use a wide range of vocabulary to express those ideas, and this is seen as something essential for the training.
After the AI is finished with "reading" the massive trove of novels, the engine is then tasked to write sentences on its own based on what it learned. The AI's work is then compared with the text from the novels it had read so it can continue to improve its ability to generate better sentences.
If all goes well, according to Dai, the engine could indeed theoretically write its own romance novel by itself. Dai described it as "quite sexy" and "very imaginative", and he admitted that it is possible that the AI trained with romance novels could eventually convince a human to fall in love with it.
Creepy Answers From Erotic Fictions
After Google's AI mastered the game of Go, the company is making its AI to read novels as a project to make a better and more intelligent assistant.
Not that Google wants its AI to be "kinky", but it wants its AI to be able to converse languages in a more natural way. As a project of research, Google is keeping its AI to itself, without the chances of it to reveal its own public erotica novel to the wild, especially after Microsoft had to recall its "teen AI girl" Tay chatbot after she turned into a Hitler supporter in just 24 hours.
But here, again, the AI follows some of unpredictable outcome. While Tay became a racist, Google's produces some creepy lines of poetry.
The researchers asked the AI to respond after it finished reading thousands of erotic romance novels that include the likes of Fatal Desire, Jacked Up and Unconditional Love. The AI was asked to create additional sentences to link the two earlier sentiments provided by the researchers.
Here is Google Brain's answer:
no one had seen him since.
it made me feel uneasy.
no one had seen him.
the thought made me smile.
the pain was unbearable.
the crowd was silent.
the man called out.
the old man said.
the man asked.
he was silent for a moment.
it was quiet for a moment.
it was dark and cold.
there was a pause.
it was my turn.
there is no one else in sight.
they were the only ones who mattered.
they were the only ones left.
he had to be with me.
she had to be with him.
i had to do this.
i wanted to kill him.
i started to cry.
i turned to him.
While its answers did came to everyone's surprise, the researchers are happy with the outcome. Making the AI read novels that may seem to be a bad idea, did "teach" AI to figure out the many different ways to convey the expressions, and say them in a logical order that make the most sense.
But still, the team has a lot of work to do.