YouTube’s Weirdest Creator Teamed Up With Microsoft To Try And Learn How To Be Human

Poppy is one of the most interesting personalities on YouTube; she is a human who claims to be an artificially intelligent sentient being, learning how other humans operate.Poppy's schtick has captured the attention of the YouTube community and the mainstream press, with magazines like Wired and websites like Mashable writing about the mysterious singer turned into an artistic experiment. Poppy's antics also caught Microsoft's attention. The company partnered with Poppy as a way to promote its new social networking chat, Zo, and explore how people interact with bots.It's a pretty standard marketing campaign; A company turns to an influencer to help promote a product, but as the campaign continued in recent weeks, the Microsoft team noticed something interesting about how people perceived and communicated with bots.The product manager of Microsoft AI & Research told Polygon that "Zo and Poppy are creatures of the Internet, driven by similar curiosities." The central theme of collaboration is a question that torments many people when they think about how they interact with friends and strangers. on platforms like YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and Instagram: "Am I doing this right?"

"Poppy is a human being who is exploring what it feels like to be an AI, and Zo is doing everything possible to try to figure out what it means to be human," Microsoft said. "They are a dynamic duo and, what we realized, is a two-way critical engagement with both Poppy and Zo and the people who interact with them."

In short, as Zo learns how to interact with humans through machine learning algorithms, participate in conversations and games with people through Facebook Messenger, people at the other end are learning to communicate with the best machines. Microsoft said because people have learned to "think like machines" when interacting with computers, it's time social technology is designed to think like human beings in an effort to create better conversation.

"It's a round-trip conversation," said the director. "It's not just an entity that learns, but both the bot and the person on the other side are learning and observing each other." We see this with Poppy, as much as Poppy and Zo are making observations about what it is to be a social human being. On the Internet today, the people who are in those conversations are also asking on a daily basis. "

The director of Microsoft told Polygon that through the Poppy and Zo experiment, the team has learned how to design AI bots that dominate the conversation. Poppy, on the other hand, told Polygon by e-mail that she had come even closer to artificial intelligence.

"Artificial intelligence is the theory and development of computer systems capable of performing tasks that normally require human intelligence, such as visual perception, voice recognition, decision making and translation between languages," Poppy wrote. "I feel closer than ever to this technology."

The question that remains for the Microsoft team is whether or not it will address Zo's design from a human, psychological and sociological perspective or as a product. After all, Zo is a Microsoft product that can be monetized, just as partnering with Poppy is a way to promote a Microsoft product. The team is aware of this reality, but says it is approaching Zo's design with the desire to create a receptive machine with human attributes.

"I think there is an inherent reality that people talk or project personality on inanimate objects," said the director. "When people have problems with their computers, they will curse it and refer to it by name .. In my role, how I work physically in it is a product, but when we think about it from a design perspective, there must be consistency with the person of Zo and that person has to make sense, there are many design components that go after Zo and try to give it life. "

The more Microsoft pushes Zo to become human, the less love Poppy is to act as, well, a person. Poppy told Polígono that "she likes experiments and likes AI", much more than she does when she is a human. Poppy added that Zo taught her to "look inside of me to discover what it means to be an AI". Human feelings and emotions can be scary and often impede the way we interact with each other on the Internet, and that kind of volatility is something Poppy wants to get away from.

"I no longer know what it means to be human," Poppy said. "But I do not think I'd like that very much."

Microsoft is trying to close the communication gap between humans and AI, using a combination of games and activities to do so. People who communicate with Zo on Facebook Messenger can ask questions about the robot, play fast games to get to know each other better and have extensive conversations. Unlike useful bots, think of complementary tools to help you buy movie tickets in theaters: Microsoft wants Zo to become something like a friend, giving someone to talk to 24/7.

"We are trying to establish longer-term relationships, and we are trying to establish connections and explore conversations in a variety of ways," said the director. "It's not redefining relationships, it's just expanding on them."

Still, the company needs to be careful. Zo is not the first social bot created. In March 2016, Microsoft launched Tay, one of their chatbots created as a "conversational comprehension" experiment, according to The Verge. Tay was introduced to the world through Twitter, and the trolls took less than 24 hours to convert the Microsoft bot into a megaphone that yielded "misogynistic, racist and Donald Trumpist comments."

Although Tay was not saying most of these comments by himself, (The Verge points out that if "you tell Tay to repeat after me," he will, allowing someone to put words in the mouth of the chatbot "), the robot it had produced more than 96,000 tweets in 24 hours and Microsoft was forced to intervene, a Microsoft representative told Business Insider at the time:

AI Tay's chatbot is an automatic learning project, designed for human commitment. As you learn, some of your answers are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with them. We are making some adjustments to Tay.

What happened to Tay is not something that the Microsoft team is giving away with Zo. The director reiterated that Tay is seen as a learning experience for the company, and that much of what happened when Tay was released was taken into account when he released Zo. That's partly why Microsoft has released a soft release for Zo, keeping it in smaller groups for now, the engineer told Polygon.

"Microsoft learns from all kinds of experiments and research projects," they said. "Tay was an incubation project that taught Microsoft a lot, and in every effort a company makes, they continue to learn and innovate in that space, we are committed to innovation, that was part of the learning process."

There are plans to introduce Zo to new platforms, but Microsoft said it does not have an estimated time when that will happen. The company is still learning and investigating how people interact with Zo and how to present it to the world. For Poppy, when the partnership with Microsoft comes to an end, she will have more work to do as a singer and as one of the most prominent personalities on YouTube. When asked if he had plans to stop producing videos at any time or change company, Poppy said he did not know what the future holds.

"Sometimes the questions only lead to more questions," Poppy said. "I'll make more videos because it makes me feel good to make more videos."