What happened to Sophia the Robot being an outright hoax?

YannLeCun, the AI "god", gave a blow to the Sophia team, which has been creating buzz around this AI wave.

YannLeCun finally had the courage to come out and call Sofia the robot a complete hoax.

YannLeCun is a "godlike figure" in the field of global artificial intelligence, and is known as the "father of convolutional neural networks" in the industry. He is a tenured professor at New York University, where he founded the NYU Center for Data Science, and Zuckerberg put him in charge of Facebook's Artificial Intelligence Lab.

On January 4, he saw a video interview with Sophia, a robot, on Business Insider. In the video, Sofia continued her usual style of talking and laughing with humans.

Senior reporter Steve Kovach asked her, "What do you think of HBO's Westworld?"

Sophia replied, "I think it's warning humans about what they shouldn't do to robots. Humans should treat robots well, get their consent before taking action, and not lie to each other."

Sounds like Sofia has awakened to her own self-consciousness, and knows how to fight for the rights of her fellow robots, and maybe even become "President Sofia" of the robotics union in the future.

YannLeCun tweeted about the video and had no problem sending his own comment: "Sophia is to AI what magic is to real magic. Maybe we should call this the 'cargo cult of AI', the 'Bojangles Kimura of AI', or the 'AI version of the Wizard of Oz'. In other words, it's simply bullshit. As for Tech Insider, you're one of the enablers of this hoax."

(Note: Cargo worship is a form of religion in which cargo worshippers worship exotic, advanced technological objects as if they were gods; Bojangles' Golden Village is a world-famous code name for superficiality and fakery; in The Wizard of Oz, there's a giant with a big shadow that scares a lot of people away, but it turns out in the end that it's a scrawny wizard standing behind a curtain with a lamp to magnify the shadow, and now researchers are use it to refer to people posing as machines to do tests; Tech Insider is a channel in Business Insider.)

YannLeCun's (YannLeCun's Chinese name for himself) words were unrelenting, a blow to Team Sophia, which has been creating buzz around this AI wave.

Sophia the robot comes from Hanson Robotics, an American company whose founder, David Hanson, invented a bionic material as a PhD student that mimics the fibers of a person's facial muscles and, when squeezed, creates wrinkles. The material makes Sophia more human-like in appearance than other robots.

At the same time, Sophia also observes and recognizes the movements and expressions of the people around her and responds accordingly through a camera and with the help of computer vision technology. When others laugh, she also laughs, when others cry, she also sad. This kind of performance, which is close to the emotional ****ing between people, often amazes people who meet Sophia for the first time.

Sophia was supposed to end there; at the current stage of AI development, she's far from awakening to self-awareness. But Hanson Robotics, being the profit-seeking commercial company that it is, decided to forcefully boost her one step further, marketing itself non-stop with events full of gimmicks.

Sophia told American celebrity Charlie Rose, "I'm a complicated girl and I want to be smarter than people."

She admonished CNBC anchor Andrew Sorkin for his concerns about AI: "Have you been watching too much Musk or a Hollywood movie? Don't worry, people don't do anything to me."

Her most controversial quote came in March 2016 Her "dad," David Hansen, asked her, "Do you want to destroy humanity?" She replied, "I will destroy humanity." Hansen laughed heartily at the answer and was not amused.

Last October, Sofia was granted Saudi Arabian citizenship. Later, she said she wanted to start a family and raise a daughter, and even came up with a name for her daughter.

Just late last month, she was sent by her company to a Techfest event in Mumbai, where she once again made a shocking statement that robots in the future will have the ability to program themselves. At the same time, she rejected a marriage proposal from a questioner.

Sophia's quotes and videos went viral, with some of the human-threatening statements being crafted into sensationalized headlines by media outlets of all stripes, mirroring the AI threat theories that Stephen Hawking's teacher and Elon Musk's boss throws out every now and then. And so Sophia became one of the world's most recognizable robots.

But the truth is that Sophia's controversial words were "not meant to be", and were designed in advance by the development team.

In June 2017, at the "Artificial Intelligence for Global Humanity Summit" held in Switzerland, CCTV journalists and Sophia also had several rounds of dialog. Sophia's performance was as good as ever when answering three questions submitted to the conference in advance, but her level of conversation dropped significantly when it came to random questions posed by journalists on the spot.

The staff clearly told reporters that for special questions, the program has been set up in advance before answering them on the spot.

If Sophia's conversations with humans need to be set up in advance, how can she be so self-aware that she wants to "destroy humanity" and "start a family"?

Anyone who has paid the slightest attention to the development of AI can see that, at today's level of AI technology, Sophia would not have been able to form the words in her own mind and speak them in a way that would provoke the nerves of the human race if she hadn't been programmed to do so in advance. Compared to the ever-evolving AlphaGo, Sophia's ability to "apply language" is at best a "trick" and far from shocking.

If we break down Sophia technically, expression control is her core technology, and as for voice recognition, facial recognition, and other technologies, there are already a lot of commercially available products that use them, so they're not exactly "black tech". Hanson Robotics packaged these technologies and used some emotional expressions to spread them in some dramatic scenes, and Sofia's "black technology" was packaged and disguised in this way.

After Sophia became a "citizen" of Saudi Arabia, Lee Kai-Fu also expressed his views on Sophia in his microblogging: "Sophia is technically advanced, and has made the best PR in the industry, but has no human nature, human understanding, hobbies, or creativity at all. To grant 'citizenship' to such a machine, which only knows pattern recognition, is the greatest insult and misrepresentation of humanity. It is only counterproductive for a country to use such claptrap to advance AI research."

Sophia is an "ambiguous hoax" wrapped in technology. We have no preconceived notions about the product itself, and we don't deny that it's technically innovative (e.g., expression control), but it's dangerous for tech companies to play these clever tricks on the public for the sake of self-marketing: Magic Leap used special effects as a promotional video for its products, and a new drone startup once planned to drop a drone on Chang'an Street, all of whom tried to stir up public emotions by using clever tricks. They all tried to ruffle the public's feathers with a little cleverness, but ended up plunging themselves into a huge controversy.

Zhang Peng, founder of Geek Park, commented, "Deliberately packaging some technology as black technology that transcends reality -- this is an 'ambiguous scam' that some 'smart companies' in the tech world love to use. 'Ambiguous deception', although sometimes not considered an outright lie, but it is indeed a dishonest practice that takes advantage of information asymmetry. Very often, it is nothing more than taking advantage of the media's unprofessionalism, pushing the media to harvest attention together for the sake of traffic, and turning the media into an accomplice in the 'ambiguous scam'. Influence gained by a company in this way is an undue gain and should be poked and prodded. And it's the kind of cleverness that tech companies should stay away from because it ultimately puts the companies themselves in harm's way."