Barbie Gets a Brain

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."

Comments

Where did they get it?

[jfdavis668]

From Abby Normal?

Unfortunately

[koan]

Humans still don't have a brain, who would give this to their child?

Each time, whatever someone said to Barbie would be recorded and transmitted via Wi-Fi to the computer servers of ToyTalk. Speech-recognition software would then convert the audio signal into a text file, which would be analyzed. The correct response would be chosen from thousands of lines scripted by ToyTalk and Mattel writers and pushed to Hello Barbie for playback

your childâ(TM)s voice sample and the start of a new "user profile" for a corporation.

And make believe occurs when?

[turning in circles]

It saddens me. This takes away a child's ability to put words in Barbie's mouth. It also helps parents abdicate the responsibility of answering the child's questions themselves. Why should a child turn to talking Barbie? Because, like the ipad, it keeps the parent free to ignore parenting a little bit more. Inevitable, I guess, but sad.

Re:And make believe occurs when?

[arth1]

This takes away a child's ability to put words in Barbie's mouth.

The way that kids use their fantasy less and less worries me too. We're turning them into consumers from an early age, not creators. And they don't figure out things anymore, they look them up.
They're trusting Friend Computer, and that worries me.

"Yes. And you're smart, too."

[Nutria]

What if the girl is actually stupid? (Not that the concept that most girls are average or below average is even thinkable is 2015...)

Re:"Yes. And you're smart, too."

[guises]

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."

Re:"Yes. And you're smart, too."

[AmiMoJo]

Children don't understand the world, language, logic or the adult world. So we lie to them. We don't tell them they are kinda ugly, because unlike adults they can't handle the harsh truth. We are taking about very young kids who still play with dolls.

Similarly, we don't Trek them they are dumb. Realistically, at that age you can't really tell if they are anyway, unless they have severe learning difficulties. Some might be late bloomers, but really the biggest influence on their eventual academic performance is how much encouragement and participation in education they get at that age.

If Barbie can get one, then maybe there is hope...

[rwyoder]

...for the 2016 GOP candidates.

Re:If Barbie can get one, then maybe there is hope

[Anonymous Coward]

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!"

Re:I don't think that term means what you think it

[JustAnotherOldGuy]

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..."