AI Designed A Walking Robot And It’s Hilariously Bad
If you’ve ever wondered if AI would be as awkward when designing a walking robot as it would writing a sitcom script, the answer is yes. A group of researchers affiliated with several scientific universities got together and asked an AI to design a robot that could walk and the results were pretty weird. The AI took less than a minute to design a robot that’s been described as “small squishy and misshapen” and moves by convulsing when inflated.
Scientists from Northwestern University, MIT, and the University of Vermont published their findings in an article for the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences on October 3 of this year. According to Sam Kriegman, an assistant professor at Northwestern, the researchers told the AI that they wanted “a robot that could walk across land,” and 26 seconds later, the AI produced blueprints for a walking robot that Kriegman said “looks nothing like any animal that has ever walked the earth.”
Robotics company Boston Dynamics has spent more than a decade designing walking robots that move via familiar parts such as legs and joints rather than just kind of expanding and contracting like the downright alien-looking balloon/sponge hybrid produced by Kriegman and Co.
For reasons unknown, the AI decided to start with a small rubber block and then proceeded to model different shapes until it landed on a design that it was happy with. The result is an automaton that moves when the researchers pump air through it.
“When humans design robots, we tend to design them to look like familiar objects,” said Kriegman before going on to say that this new AI-designed walking robot that looks like nothing else on Earth represents “new possibilities and new paths forward that humans have never even considered.”
Indeed, robotics company Boston Dynamics has spent more than a decade designing walking robots that move via familiar parts such as legs and joints rather than just kind of expanding and contracting like the downright alien-looking balloon/sponge hybrid produced by Kriegman and Co.
While Kriegman’s AI-generated walking robot isn’t alive per se, it does feel like a completely new organism due to its foreign appearance and the way it moves.
The group’s findings serve as yet another showcase for the wacky things AI, at its current state of consciousness, can produce when prompted. Things such as the AI-generated sitcom Nothing Forever. The OpenAI GPT-3 produced Seinfeld clone streamed for months on Twitch before being shut down after one of the characters made homophobic remarks during a standup routine.
Other imperfect creations that have stemmed from AI include songs from dead artists that sound eerily accurate and pictures of celebrities with dead eyes and fingers where they shouldn’t be.
If Kriegman’s AI walking robot is the result of 26 seconds of deliberation by a computer, what happens if it’s given a whole minute to come up with something?
Of course, none of those things presents quite the dystopian image of an AI creating a completely new species from scratch. While Kriegman’s AI-generated walking robot isn’t alive per se, it does feel like a completely new organism due to its foreign appearance and the way it moves.
If Jurassic Park has taught us anything, it’s that this weird purple blob that jerks forward when someone blows into it will only be the beginning when it comes to AI-designed robots that move in ways humans have never conceived.
If Kriegman’s AI walking robot is the result of 26 seconds of deliberation by a computer, what happens if it’s given a whole minute to come up with something? What if the prompt changes from “a robot that can walk across land” to one that can “disable a human resistance fighter” or something equally frightening? Judging by the above AI-generated contraption, humanity is safe for a while yet, but it’s only a matter of time…
