A team of programmers has just equipped a Boston Dynamics robot dog with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Text-to-Speech voice modulation. In this way Spot, this is the name of the robot dog, speaks. Not only that: he speaks like a human beinghaving humanoid conversations thanks to the ChatGPT language model.
In a video posted their Twitterthe engineer Santiago Valdarrama it shows us how Spot answers their questions. “These robots perform automated missions every day,” Valdarrama explained in his Twitter post, noting that each mission includes “mile-long, hard-to-understand configuration files” that only engineers can understand. “This is where ChatGPT comes in,” he continued she. “We show him the configuration files and mission results. Then we ask him questions related to that context. Combined with a voice interface, we have a fantastic way to interact with him”.
The robot dog that speaks thanks to AI: is it endearing or scary?
As seen in the video, Spot, in addition to responding, also interacts with his body, shaking his head to say no or bowing to say yes. While the interface itself looks pretty harmless, many people who saw the video were frightened by it.
One of SpotGPT’s biggest critics is Washington Post columnist Philip Bump, who commented with a gif of a humanoid robot wielding a machine gun. It’s not the first time that Bump has criticized the wave of AI technologies that are invading the tech world. And he’s not the only one, many web users are frightened by the “advent of robots”.
To us, however, Spot is so endearing. Who knows if he eats chip croquettes.