Next time you feel Google is kinda hitting on you, it could be an undesirable outcome from the current experiment they’re running on their artificial intelligence across their products. In order to make the Google app seem less robotic and more human, the company is having the neural network sift through romance novels.
Why romance novels? Apparently, they all follow the same plot, but with different words and character interactions. By training the neural network, Google is hoping it would pick up natural conversation skills.
In the Google app, the responses are very factual,” Andrew Dai, the Google software engineer who led the project, told BuzzFeed News. “Hopefully with this work, and future work, it can be more conversational, or can have a more varied tone, or style, or register. Feeding novels to an AI engine isn’t simple. The engine, also known as a neural network, is a computer program that can learn on its own. But that doesn’t mean it’s born smart. The neural network starts off without any knowledge base, so feeding it text from a book is like reading a novel to a baby and hoping it picks some of it up. This is why it requires reams of data — or about 2,865 romance novels — on which to build its so-called intelligence.
Swoon.
Source: BuzzFeed
