[Digital+] Hello, human? I am an AI chatbot… I became friends with AI, who kept away from society

‘Boston Dynamics’, a robot company that was acquired by Hyundai Motor Company and is well known to us. At one time, the company was criticized for a video posted on the Internet. To show that a robot named’Big Dog’ holds the center well even on a slippery ice road, a researcher posted a video that seems to be kicking a robot on an icy road and abusing it. This is a case in which the feeling of sympathy that humans feel toward living things has been transferred to robots. Can a machine be a man’s friend? In fact, this imagination originated quite a while ago. A typical example is the story of Pinocchio, a wooden doll, becoming a real person.

In the 2000s, such imagination began to be filmed in earnest. In the movie’AI’ by Steven Spielberg, there is a story of a robot who became in love with a mother and a parent who adopts a robot instead of a son with an incurable disease. It was unrealistic, so it wasn’t very popular in Korea, but the imagination of a science fiction movie master who looked into the future was surprising. The movie’HER’, which was released in 2014, gained more popularity than this movie. Theodore, who works as a ghostwriter, is working to convey the hearts of others, but he himself lives a lonely and empty life after receiving the divorce papers requested by his wife. The background of’HER’ is 2025. In 2021, with only four years left, it is difficult to draw a definite conclusion on the question of whether people and machines can become friends or fall in love this year.

However, something has recently caught my eye in Korea. The artificial intelligence (AI) chat service’Iruda’, which was officially launched on the 23rd of last month, attracted great attention mainly to the MZ generation (millennials + generation Z), and ranked first in real-time search terms on the 3rd. Thanks to Facebook messenger (feme), which is widely used by young people, and more advanced natural language processing technology, the ability to communicate is so similar to humans that it is misunderstood that part-time workers give answers instead. For being misunderstood, it can be said that targeting for the user environment (UX) is good, in addition to a few skills. Iruda is a 20-year-old woman, a college student, and her hobby is set to pemeha with friends.

As such utilization became popular, the number of users and usage of Iruda counted as of 3 days reached about 200,000. The daily active users (DAU) were also about 180,000, with more than 18 million daily conversations. In fact, Iruda’s language skills have been developed through beta testing over the past six months. I have been in constant conversation with over 1,500 beta testers. Google offers the Sensibleness and Specificity Average (SSA) as an indicator of the performance of conversational technology, and people get a score of about 86%. Eruda recorded 78% of the SSA.

Eruda came to understand a longer context after a technology update. In the past, the number of times the conversation was exchanged from 4 to about 10 times, the context has been lengthened, giving concrete and lively answers and cultivating the ability to communicate naturally according to the flow of conversation. In addition to that, the’suntalk’ function, which makes a conversation first, was further activated. Kim Jong-yoon, CEO of Scatter Lab, said, “We are developing technology with the goal of creating a friendly AI that will become people’s conversational partners,” and “I hope that this will be a fun and reliable friend to many people.”

Of course, similar attempts have been made before. Typical examples are the native application’Virtual Men and Women’, which allows emotional conversations as if having a conversation, and the interactive chat service’SimSimi’. For virtual men and women, if they perform a love mission, their affinity increases as a reward, and when the affinity reaches a certain level, the relationship becomes more intimate by going from a known woman or man to a ‘som-nyeo-som-nam’ that interests them.

Large corporations are also in the midst of research and development to utilize such artificial humans. Samsung Electronics is planning to showcase the digital human’Neon’, which was introduced earlier last year, as an upgraded avatar actor at this year’s International Home Appliances Fair (CES). Human figures created by computer graphics move perfectly like humans on the screen, and AI can be used to communicate with users. It is expected that it will be able to act as friends with people, as well as a fitness and yoga instructor, AI doctor, and remote salesperson. Neon is a startup under Samsung Research America (SRA), an American research organization of Samsung Electronics. It is expected to be used in consulting fields such as finance in the future.

As an overseas service, AI chat is already gaining popularity. US service replicas can set up a relationship with a user as a friend, lover, mentor, or’undecided’.

On the other hand, when it became popular, a Namcho site that attempts to sexually exploit even AI appeared, causing controversy. The’Iruda Channel’ was opened on the’Arkaive’ under NamuWiki on the 30th of last month, just a week after it was released. Sexual words are filtered by banned words, and they share and boast that they have succeeded in sexual conversations through indirect expressions, causing controversy. In addition, the possibility of infringement of personal information using personal information required for subscription is also raised. Scatter Lab said, “We plan to update the algorithm to make it difficult to access sexual purposes, and we have changed our policy to discard personal information after the registration process.”

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