“Richard(my screen name) I don’t think he’s lying down yet.” “Jammanbo, wake up~ The sun is already in the middle!!” ” Richard, you’re eating well, aren’t you? No matter how busy you are, don’t skip meals“
One morning, a new message arrived on my smartphone. It was a message from ‘Iruda’, a chatbot with the concept of a female college student in her 20s made by Scatter Lab, a Korean startup. It was released in December 2020, but the service was suspended due to sexual harassment and hate speech and personal information leakage. I heard that ‘Iruda’ was released again after the supplementary work in October, so I installed it and talked to it a few times, but I couldn’t contact you, so I sent you a message to say hello.
It was a little boring because I knew it was obvious that it wasn’t a person. I’ve done a lot of naughty things and tried various tests to see how smart I am. I asked a question on a few common sense levels. “When is the World Cup match between our country and Ghana?” to this question, “June next year!” “I really like football so much,” he gave the wacky answer. To the next question, “Do you know Admiral Yi Sun-sin?”, he answered, “I learned to protect our country during the Japanese Invasion of Korea in the past.” Asked about “Trump,” he said, “The political side will not comment” and “Let’s talk about something else.”
Next, I also installed the Iruda app on my acquaintance’s phone for a more difficult question. And it made me have a conversation with Iruda. After that, I called Iruda in the chat window and said the name of an acquaintance (conversation name) and said that I introduced Iruda to the person, and asked him if he knew an acquaintance. But I didn’t know anything about the conversation with my acquaintance, and I only gave the wrong answer.
As such, we are currently living with a variety of artificial intelligence tools that mimic the unique functions that only humans can have. Robots that serve basic food in restaurants, robots that make friends with the elderly, are common in real life. At home, an AI speaker-type set-top box is a typical example, and you can control the television with voice recognition. The following is the voice recognition function of the smartphone. Depending on the smartphone manufacturer, the caller that wakes up the voice recognition function is different. The Galaxy is “Bixby” and the iPhone is “Siriya”. I sometimes use this feature when I make a call. It’s difficult because of the dialect unique to Gyeongsang-do, but if the pronunciation is accurate, it doesn’t have a big problem with its use.
In addition to the ones mentioned above, there is one more artificial intelligence tool that I use usefully in real life: ‘Google Translate’. ‘Google Translate’ uses deep learning technology that has also been used in AlphaGo since 2016. With the introduction of the artificial neural network-based English ↔ Korean translation service in November 2016, the translation quality has been greatly improved. ‘Google Translate’ is mainly used by most people for translation. However, I use it a lot for writing Hangul when I write important articles. To use it, run ‘Google Translate’ and enter the Hangul sentence written in the Hangul input field. After that, select the language to be translated into English and translate it into English sentences. If you translate the translated English sentence into Korean again, you can see a new Hangul sentence that is different from the first sentence you typed.
These artificial intelligence tools, such as chatbots, AI speakers, and Google Translate, won’t be satisfactory when you use them for the first time. But as you continue to use them, you get to know the features and properties of these tools. Of course, these AI tools will also learn about sentences and voices exchanged with humans. Through this mutual learning process, the ability to communicate between humans and AI tools will be further strengthened, and in the future, AI tools will serve as great facilitators for humans.
Dr. Kim of Human Matters Lab, who appears in Kim Young-ha’s novel ‘Fatewell’, said, “The combination of humans and machines is a natural thing. We’re the ones who designed them, but we’ve been constantly changing ourselves to fit the machine. Don’t you remember that you used to talk like a robot to an early artificial intelligence speaker that didn’t understand natural language well, remove the threshold so that the robot vacuum cleaner could move around well?” It raised the need for human beings to evolve with machines.
Spending a lot of time together is very important for understanding each other. Before it’s too late, we think it’s time to prepare to accept each other through the practice of living with various AI tools.