Writers For AI Development
Four years ago, Amazon released its smart assistant named Alexa. Alexa and other virtual assistants work around the clock to organize your life, but someone who has a heavy workload often has no time to build an interpersonal relationship with you. This type of relationship is essential for an assistant job — it builds respect and lets us see our assistants like individuals. This is what we want to achieve as AI developers: Artificial Intelligence which is human-like. How might we achieve such a uniquely human relationship?
Building an Interpersonal Relationship with AI
One approach is to develop a self-thinking machine. This goal is not reachable soon, but we know a workaround from our daily Netflix sessions. Every evening we adopt the inner perspective of our favorite series’ heroes, and see life from their perspectives. This is exactly what we want to achieve for our users and their virtual assistants. So, the answer to the question of interpersonal relationships with virtual assistants is storytelling.
The field of storytelling reminds us that there is no way to love or hate a person if you have not heard that person’s story; that’s why our virtual assistant needs to have a backstory. It makes no difference whether the person is real or not. Robert McKee describes in his books that a story is a metaphor for life — stories awaken feelings. Aristotle similarly once said that stories are a guide to life: you adapt your life to stories and you look for new life-models in them. Often, a connection with movie characters arises when they make decisions in difficult situations. The true character of a person manifests itself in the decisions they make under pressure. The greater the pressure, the more the decision reflects the innermost nature of the figure. Difficult situations often appear for virtual assistants, such as when users ask for unanswerable questions. In this situation, normal virtual assistants just answer with standard answers like, “I don’t understand,” or “I can’t help you.” In this case, the true character of the virtual assistant is revealed. We, as AI developers, have to avoid such standard answers, and instead our AIs should answer such problematic user-questions with a backstory.
Once again, stories define people, they shape the character of a person. Virtual assistants should not only be slaves, they should also have their own opinion based on their story. Here, story should not be the alternative for an artificial intelligence with consciousness, but a supplement. According to the dramatist Jean Anouilh, fiction gives life a form. Thus, stories support the development of artificial intelligence, making virtual assistants more than just empty shells.
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