Engineers over at Google have recently been feeding text from steamy romance novels to their own artificial intelligence (AI) engine to give it the ability to produce more human, conversational text, as per a report from BuzzFeed News.
Google Feeding Its Artificial Intelligence System With Steamy Text From Romance Novels
The researchers of Google have been able to get the AI system to be able to write out full sentences that resemble what you can normally see in a typical romance novel. This might be a very unlikely genre to which the search engine giant would tackle upon, but it is still seen as a step for improvement for the company’s products’ facility when it comes to the written word.
Andrew Dai, Google software engineer who is in charge with the aforementioned project, has told Buzzfeed the following: “In the Google app, the responses are very factual. Hopefully with this work, and future work, it can be more conversational, or can have a more varied tone, or style, or register.”
Many question the research as to how could romance novels make such good language teachers? To start, narratives that dwell on the romantic would follow a very predictable blueprint with regards to its plot. Of course, the names of the characters and settings might change from book to book, but the core of the story formula is still similar. The idea for the artificial intelligence is that it can easily browse through this material in order to find patterns within the sentences that can be found in each novel. Hence, it will get a broader comprehension of the language in its entirety. At the time of writing, the researchers over at the company responsible for the well-known search engine has already fed their artificial intelligence approximately 2,865 romantic books.
But of course, this kind of cognitive machine-based learning is not only exclusive to this one company. There are other tech firms, such as that of IBM as they have a cognitive computing system called Watson, who have been feeding their own AIs with countless information to allow them to do various tasks which include designing a dress, helping doctors make more targeted diagnoses, or even play Jeopardy!
Aside from Microsoft’s attempt to bring forth a chatty AI that went by the name of Tay (which was pulled because it learned to spout negative comments), Google aims that their AI system to be more polite, and of course, more romantic.