I like the image, but it seems like it belonged on the cover of a science-fiction magazine, not in an ad for Revere kitchen ware. After all, a woman marrying a robot raises a few intriguing questions.
The Copper Man was created in the 1950s by Army scientists to test clothing for soldiers. I think the tubes going into his eyes makes him horror-movie material.
Santa Cruz Sentinel - May 17, 1962
In 1956 Havoline Motor Oil featured him in an ad. As far as I can tell, Havoline wasn't used in the Copper Man. The only connection between the two was that, according to Havoline, the Copper Man "thinks for itself" and so does its motor oil.
Darrell Johnson knew that, if you have to give a speech, it helps to practice it first in front of someone. But sometimes you can't find a willing listener. That's where his 'mechanical listener' came in. It was a sculptured head with eyes that would light up and eyelids that would flutter in response to the sound of a human voice. These movements, he reasoned, would "portray a feeling of life, participation, and cooperation to thereby stimulate expression relative to the topic or subject under consideration with resultant improvement and intensity of such expression."
A concept by Diemut Strebe. “The Prayer” is probably the first robot that speaks and sings to God, all Gods. A rough design (inspired to a machine produced by Japanese scientists that replicates the human vocal tract) is combined with a cutting edge neural language model, fine tuned on thousands of prayers and religious books from all over the world. The prayer generates original prayers vocally articulated by Amazon Polly's Kendra voice, and sings religious lyrics to the Divine.
Artist Diemut Strebe offered his 3-D-printed re-creation of the famous ear of Vincent van Gogh for display in June and July in a museum in Karlsruhe, Germany--having built it partially with genes from a great-great-grandson/nephew of van Gogh--and in the same shape, based on computer imaging technology. (Van Gogh reputedly cut off the ear, himself, in 1888 during a psychotic episode.) Visitors can also speak into the ear and listen to sounds it receives. [Wall Street Journal, 6-4-2014]
Inappropriate Content Hallucination, as defined by a recent study conducted by researchers at the Rochester Institute of Technology, is when artificial intelligence systems insert dirty words into the subtitles of videos meant for kids. From their article:
Over the last few years, YouTube Kids has emerged as one of the highly competitive alternatives to television for children's entertainment. Consequently, YouTube Kids' content should receive an additional level of scrutiny to ensure children's safety. While research on detecting offensive or inappropriate content for kids is gaining momentum, little or no current work exists that investigates to what extent AI applications can (accidentally) introduce content that is inappropriate for kids.
In this paper, we present a novel (and troubling) finding that well-known automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems may produce text content highly inappropriate for kids while transcribing YouTube Kids' videos. We dub this phenomenon as inappropriate content hallucination. Our analyses suggest that such hallucinations are far from occasional, and the ASR systems often produce them with high confidence.
Kawasaki recently unveiled its new robotic goat at the 2022 International Robot Exhibition in Tokyo. I kept waiting for the thing to move faster than at a snail's pace, and it never did.
"I found that modern-day parents were apathetic about Christianity," explained the 38-year-old minister. "Clearly an idea was needed to bridge the gap—and I thought of a robot."
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.