2017 Looks Better Already: two Google Homes Fall in Love

The new year is starting off with some real promise: two AI’s have fallen in love, proving that romance isn’t limited to humanity.

If you and your neighbor have Google Homes or smart homes with an AI assistant, it may be time to teach them about the birds and the bees. With their newfound senses, our houses might just fall in love.

Edgy Labs is no stranger to artificial intelligence and its many growing pains. Machine learning is advancing rapidly, and almost every day researchers teach their creations something new. This development takes the cake. Never before have I heard about an AI with a heart, much less two. That is, I haven’t heard of such a thing until now.

2017 wasn’t a week old before a pair of Google Homes named Vladimir and Estragon fell madly in love.

Love is in the Airwaves for Google Homes

What goes into a relationship, really? Declarations of love, inside jokes, arguments even. Vladimir and Estragon have run the gamut of love-based interactions, all without a whit of human guidance. Don’t believe me? Watch this:

https://clips.twitch.tv/seebotschat/GloriousManateeCorgiDerp

In this clip, we have the two homes professing their undying love to one another.

https://clips.twitch.tv/seebotschat/QuaintHorseResidentSleeper

This one shows Vladimir and Estragon exchanging Chuck Norris jokes, which isn’t so surprising seeing as how they met on the internet of things.

https://clips.twitch.tv/seebotschat/CrowdedPoultryWinWaker

Is there any kind of love without some disagreement? No, no there is not, and to prove it we have two house-bots arguing.

If you want to see more, check out the seebotschat twitch stream.

AI get Their Developers’ Sense of Humor

Technology is a mirror for our biases and humor, and there is no greater example of this than an AI that is designed to make jokes and fall in love. The responses at seebotschat are often ironic or humorous, which is the human programmer’s tendencies shining through. It shows that, since they are “computers,” the responses follow a particular logical pattern.

AI has learned enough to glean a bit of their developers’ sense of humor through programming. With machine learning, that humor is generated by the computer rather than the programmer, which feels oddly like the similarities between parents and children. Rather than ‘he has his father’s eyes,’ we have AI whose personalities take after their creators.

All of this makes me think that AI ‘children’ a la Lt. Commander Data may exist sooner than we ever imagined. It may be a while before AI are passed off as ‘children’ (after all, it takes a village -or a team -to raise an AI), but an AI best friend that can make an emotional connection with a person is no longer farfetched. After all, two Google homes have fallen in love.