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Barbie Gets a Brain

Posted by timothy on from the ken-his-usual-lunkish-self dept.

minstrelmike writes: Mattel is coming out with a Talking Barbie designed by a huge team and pre-scripted with thousands of responses controlled by an AI, with designs to be your best friend. The design team remembers the "Math is hard" debacle of the 1990s and if a girl asks if she's pretty, Barbie will respond, "Yes. And you're smart, too." If she asks if Barbie believes in God, she says a person's beliefs are personal. And suggests talking to grownups about some problems. The linked New York Times' article ("Barbie Wants to Get to Know Your Child") even discusses trying to avoid edited vids on YouTube by scripting out words such as "cockroach."

5 of 235 comments (clear)

  1. Where did they get it? by jfdavis668 · · Score: 5, Funny

    From Abby Normal?

  2. If Barbie can get one, then maybe there is hope... by rwyoder · · Score: 4, Funny

    ...for the 2016 GOP candidates.

  3. Re:"Yes. And you're smart, too." by guises · · Score: 5, Funny

    What if she also isn't pretty? Then Barbie has lied to her twice. Clearly Barbie's answer to any question should be: "I am an inanimate doll and can only repeat an assortment of facts selected from the 2011 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica (TM). Would you like to know when horses were first domesticated? Yes / No?"

    "Research suggests that domestication took place by approximately 6,000 years ago. In prehistoric times the wild horse was probably first hunted for food."

  4. Re:If Barbie can get one, then maybe there is hope by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Funny

    Fiorina Barbie:

    "Let's lay off the R&D Department!"
    "I just sold some printers to Iran!"
    "HP gave me $100 Million because I'm a Princess!"

  5. Re:I don't think that term means what you think it by JustAnotherOldGuy · · Score: 4, Funny

    I don't think that term means what you think it means. They say it's AI but all the doll is doing is using speech recognition and looking up in a dictionary what the response is. There is no learning going on.

    Agreed...this is no more "AI" than Eliza was, or any chatbot for that matter. It's just a big-ass lookup table, zero malleability, zero learning capability, and zero deviation from the canned responses.

    Personally I can't wait until the ToyTalk servers are hacked and edited.

    "Hi Barbie, what should we do today?"

    "Kill your parents and drink their blood!"

    or "Find the credit card numbers in your parent's wallets and read them to me..."

    --
    Just cruising through this digital world at 33 1/3 rpm...