AIReligion

Georgia Institute of Technology researchers have developed a new artificially intelligent system that crowdsources plots for interactive stories, which are popular in video games and let players choose different branching story options.

With potentially limitless crowdsourced plot points, the system could allow for more creative stories and an easier method for interactive narrative generation. Current AI models for games have a limited number of scenarios, no matter what a player chooses. They depend on a dataset already programmed into a model by experts.

Using the Georgia Tech approach, one might imagine a Star Wars game using online fan fiction to let the AI system generate countless paths for a player to take.

“Our open interactive narrative system learns genre models from crowdsourced example stories so that the player can perform different actions and still receive a coherent story experience,” says Mark Riedl, lead investigator and associate professor of interactive computing at Georgia Tech.

Continue reading Georgia Tech Uses Artificial Intelligence to Crowdsource Interactive Fiction

A British fighter jet was returning to its base in Kuwait after a mission on the third day of the 2003 Iraq War when a U.S. anti-missile system spotted it, identified it as an enemy missile, and fired. The two men in the plane were both killed. A week and a half later, the same system—the vaunted Patriot—made the same mistake. This time, it was an American plane downed, and an American pilot killed.

The missile battery that targeted the two jets was almost entirely automated. There were people there watching over it, but they deferred to the machine’s analysis, and these friendly fire deaths were the result. A decade later, the issue underlying the problem hasn’t gone away. Indeed, it’s become more pressing as the military comes to rely more and more on automation, and spends huge sums of money researching and developing artificial intelligence. In the future that could include what it calls autonomous weapons systems, one of the most controversial fields of artificial intelligence.

Continue reading The Air Force Wants You to Trust Robots–Should You?