Without an official announcement, we’re in the era of Artificial Intelligence (AI). On an almost daily basis, AI technologies are pushing their way into our lives. It is increasingly applied in science, but also the medical industry is using AI to help detect diseases. AI systems are now superior at numerous tasks that were once done best by humans.
Despite the promising capabilities of AI, when it comes to human capabilities, Artificial Intelligence falls short. Take conversational AIs. We humans are not only intelligent, we are unable to separate our emotions from the way in which we apply intelligence. These emotions are integrated within our reasoning process when we form human reactions, especially when it might affect other people’s behavior. AI simply cannot provide certain factors crucial in human interaction, such as humor, warmth and the ability to anticipate on someone else’s behavior. The systems just have no empathy or feelings.
Over the last couple of years, AI has improved significantly in detecting human emotions. But until now, nobody has managed to integrate these skills successfully into an actual conversational AI system. And indeed, how to explain a robot how humor operates? We humans are social creatures, but the systems still lack a deeper understanding of different meanings of words, the emotions they can convey and the potential impact they can have.
There are still a lot of difficulties to overcome before conversational AIs are capable to actually sound human. They are a long time away from feeling emotion akin to us humans, mastering our ‘sophisticated’ language style and have a chat in the human sense of the word.
Brynjolfsson, E., and Mcafee, A. (2017). The business of artificial intelligence: what it can and cannot do for your organization. Harvard Business Review
Darlington, K. (2018). AI systems dealing with human emotions: how the future will be like with emotional machines. Retrieved from https://www.bbvaopenmind.com/en/ai-systems-dealing-with-human-emotions/
Dethlefs, N. (2018). You know nothing AI, that’s why you’re bad at conversation. Retrieved from https://thenextweb.com/syndication/2018/09/27/you-know-nothing-ai-thats-why-youre-bad-at-conversation/
Ritchie, G. (2009). Can computers create humor?. AI Magazine, 30(3), 71.
