Welcome to this edition of Over a Cup of Coffee!

In this newsletter

• AI boosts creativity but…..

• Audio instructions make robots better

• No, Alexa, No!

AI boosts creativity but…..

In a recent study conducted at the University of Exeter in the UK, researchers found that using Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools boosts users' creativity.

About 300 participants were asked to write micro stories for young adults and 600 people were asked to judge them. When the authors used AI for story ideas, the readers found that the stories were written better and were 15 percent less boring.

The study found that writers who were more creative in their work benefitted less from the use of AI. However, those who were less creative saw a boost in reader acceptance when they used AI.

While less creative writers would still be happy with the gains, the researchers also found that an associated cost with this creativity boost - the loss of uniqueness.

When AI-suggested story ideas were compared, the team found that they had more similarities and were less varied.

So, while the use of AI might help writers make their work more interesting to read, it could also lead to more of the same type of output being generated, making it dull and boring in the long run.

The research findings were published in the journal Science Advances.

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Audio instructions make robots better

Robots are typically trained using visual data but researchers at Stanford University and Toyota Research Institute have found that adding audio data can help improve their learning skills.

Just like training AI tools, robots too are trained by feeding them large amounts of data about their task. However, the researchers wondered if adding audio data would help them learn better.

So, the team experimented with different tasks, such as flipping a bagel, erasing a whiteboard with an eraser, and transferring dice from one cup to another.

To verify, whether the robot learnt better with audio, the team carried out the experiments in duplicate, one with video alone and one with audio and video.

You can see these experiments in this video on YouTube.

The researchers found that audio inputs did improve speed and accuracy of some tasks but not all. For instance, erasing the whiteboard and transferring dice from one cup to another were performed better with audio inputs, but it did not matter when flipping a bagel.

The research findings were published in the preprint paper on arxiv.

No, Alexa, No!

In 2021, a 10-year-old girl asked Alexa for a challenge to pass her time. Alexa responded promptly, “Plug in a phone charger about halfway into a wall outlet, then touch a penny to the exposed prongs.“

Luckily, the girl’s mother heard the response and fired back , “No, Alexa, no!”

Alexa’s response came from a viral TikTok trend that was ongoing at the time. But little did the voice assistant know that the act was leading to accidents where people were losing their fingers and hands.

Three years later, chatbots are the in thing and there is nothing stopping them from suggesting equally dangerous tasks to children today.

Nomisha Kurian at the University of Cambridge suggests it is likely that such incidents will occur because of the empathy gap in large language models that power them.

The need to fill this void is urgent but the job is not of the company building the chatbots alone.

Recommendations to make AI safer for children are in this Learning, Media and Technology paper.

Thank you for reading till the end.

Until next time,
Ameya