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New York school pauses plan to deploy humanlike AI robot teacher after backlash (apnews.com)
submitted 1 month ago by to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Right before the AI boom really started to take off there was a robot "companion" named Moxie that I thought struck exactly the right balance - it was nowhere near the uncanny valley, staying firmly on the cute robot side, and it used a projected cartoon face that was simple but expressive. Unfortunately the company's timing was rather poor, they went out of business right before the AI back end would have been able to make full use of an avatar like this. I'd love to see another version of this approach.

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  • [–] 8 points 1 month ago (2 children)

    I don't know, Moxie feels like a DreamWorks character popped inside of a plastic casing. Especially with that image, it comes across like a render or a movie character than a real thing.

    Personally, I'm more partial to robots that don't have a human-like face at all. Like Jibo, whose "face" was a simple flat circle on a screen. Cosmo might be the upper end, where it has two "eyes" (squares) on a screen, but no other features.

    IMO there's a bit of a mistake in trying to have human faces on robots. Not only do you then have to contend with the uncanny valley, but you don't really need those to convey the same thing. Pose and things like that work equally as well.

    We don't have people walking around trying to put human faces on cats and dogs, but we can understand them well enough all the same.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 month ago

    Here's an unboxing video, this timestamp skips straight to Moxie coming online. Moxie is a real product. And the video is from three years ago, before convincing video generation AI was a thing, in case that was a concern.

    Moxie does pose as well, its various joints are motorized. The arms exist entirely to point and gesticulate, they don't have grippers.

    We don't have people walking around trying to put human faces on cats and dogs, but we can understand them well enough all the same.

    They do have faces, though. Dogs literally developed additional facial muscles compared to wolves apparently as a means of improving their communication with human companions. Moxie's face isn't a human face, it's highly stylized.

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