Ben
While it has been reported more than once that AI systems have been taken offline by human researchers, as they’d created languages people couldn’t understand (the reality was a little more complex than that), xHamster is doing precisely the opposite by encouraging its homegrown AI to develop its own language by using porn clips.
Exactly what sort of hideous linguistic creation could result remains to be seen – and let’s face it, we probably aren’t going to understand much of what it’s communicating anyway given the recent record on AI languages but the wider purpose behind this entire effort, xHamster says, is so that it can better serve your porn needs.
All the clips that xHamster’s bots are learning from are user-uploaded movies and ultimately the endeavour will provide the company with more data about its users through a better understanding of them, their viewing habits and how content preferences evolve over time.
The more specific point of encouraging xHamster bots to develop their own language is to make their own machine-t0-machine communication more efficient, and therefore speed up the rate at which they learn. AI-developed languages, while nonsensical to people, are considerably more efficient for computers than English, for example.
To encourage this to happen, each time a bot learns and communicates a new word, task or concept using audio sound from a video uploaded to the site, it is rewarded.
If, for some reason, you want to hear some indiscernible porn-like noises, xHamster’s also provided a 30-second clip of the sort of audio the bots are learning from which is below. Probably best not to listen without headphones on the bus though, eh.
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