AI has always been in the news ever since ChatGPT has become a cellphone staple for all of us. Several incidents of crazy and bizarre acts by robots keep surfacing the Internet day in and day out. Another such shocking incident has gone viral recently wherein an AI dog is seen attacking people. The video from a Japanese exhibit has left netizens in splits sparking a lot of debate online. Here’s what it is.
The video is from an exhibition held by robotics designer Takayuki Todo at Toda Hall & Conference in Tokyo. It showcases a robodog artwork called ‘The Dynamics of a Dog on a Chain’. It features two chained AI dogs at the beginning but what happens next has left everyone spellbound. The footage shows both the dogs tied with a chain. While one is standing quietly near a pole, the other tries to attack people by moving forward. As the chain keeps pulling it back, the robodog keeps getting aggressive and violent. It tries to attack the bystanders several times but fails.
Netizens were shocked to see the carelessness pertaining to the visitors as they weren’t warned of the robodog’s aggressiveness. There were hardly any protective measures in place. The pedestrians and bystanders were given no warnings; only a yellow line was present. There was no alert for the robots getting ‘re-activated’ after their frequent breaks leaving the exhibition visitors perplexed at the dog’s sudden attacks. The management seemed to be pretty calm considering the reckless behavior of the AI ‘animals’ and this has angered the Internet causing heated debates online.
But why did all of it happen in the first place? Was it a technical malfunction? Well, no. The robodogs were meant to attack the humans ‘deliberately’ and the designer Takayuki Todo justified why. Apparently, it was an experiment aimed at exploring the boundaries between technology and art. It was intended to be reckless and divisive which is why the chained robotic attack dog was engineered accordingly. With this experiment, Todo aimed to blend art and robotics in such a fashion that it would challenge human emotions and perceptions of AI.
The chained robotic dog by Unitree, a Chinese company, was programmed to lunge aggressively at the visitors probing them to scratch their heads wondering about AI safety and human-machine relationships. The goal was to understand how people react when robots reciprocate human-like emotions. The aesthetics were deliberately intended to create tension and uneasiness among the participants while the AI dog did not actually pose any real danger to them. The video has since gone viral garnering extreme reactions from users online.
