China News Finance, January 19 (Reporter Song Yusheng) Artificial intelligence has begun to enter the human workplace.
Since last year, the virtual anchors "trained" by imitating live anchors have begun to broadcast financial information 24 hours a day. In the 70 days that the virtual anchor tried to run, many viewers always thought that the show was recorded by a real person. But in fact, the content that the audience sees, including faces, expressions, body movements, words, etc., is generated by artificial intelligence.
Imitate the virtual anchor "trained" by the live anchor. Image courtesy of Xiaoice team
At the end of last year, Yu Liang, chairman of the board of directors of Vanke Group, sent a message in his WeChat circle of friends: "Congratulations to 'Cui Xiaopan' for winning the 2021 Vanke Headquarters Best Newcomer Award, and the write-off rate of overdue documents due in advance that she urged reached 91.44%. The employee named "Cui Xiaopan" is Vanke's first digital employee, who collected overdue documents by email and completed the work with a much higher efficiency than humans.
Digital employee Cui Xiaopan. Image courtesy of Xiaoice team
As the team that created these virtual people, Xu Yuanchun, chief operating officer of Xiaoice Company and head of the Artificial Intelligence Creativity Lab, was recently interviewed by reporters.
In Xu Yuanchun's impression, artificial intelligence has developed to the point where it can enter the workplace and become a "colleague" with humans, and has experienced a "long" "evolution".
"A few years ago, a virtual anchor, when speaking, only the mouth was moving. At that time, everyone thought that this technology looked very strange. "But now the artificial intelligence technology is enough to make the movements and sounds of virtual anchors reach the level of close to real people."
Why do humans need such artificial intelligence? Xu Yuanchun said that his original intention was to "help mankind."
"From a technical point of view, we hope that artificial intelligence can help humans. But we are slowly realizing that giving artificial intelligence some capabilities that were not easy for humans to achieve in the past is to help human beings. ”
It is based on this consideration that Xu Yuanchun believes that mature artificial intelligence should have the ability to surpass humans in a certain field. "This can help others, otherwise artificial intelligence is just a simple superposition." And if artificial intelligence is the same as ordinary people, its significance is not so great. ”
During this period, concerns about ai-powered replacement of humans have been causing public discussion.
But in Xu Yuanchun's view, the development of technology is changing everyone's way of life, and human thoughts are changing accordingly. "Have you noticed that the discussion about whether humans will be replaced by artificial intelligence has been less and less recently?"
In 2016, when the artificial intelligence Alpha Go defeated the human chess players, the so-called "artificial intelligence threat theory" became a hot topic of discussion for a while.
Infographic: The Human-Machine War of Go in 2016.
6 years later, in 2022, more and more people are getting used to the existence of artificial intelligence. Artificial intelligence voice interaction engines such as Xiao Ai, Xiao Du, and Tmall Genie are being used more and more widely.
When everyone can brush the "virtual person" video in the mobile phone every day, and the metaverse has become a hot topic, the voice of fear of artificial intelligence has indeed been greatly reduced. Humans seem to have accepted the presence of artificial intelligence in our work and life.
According to Xu Yuanchun, in companies that have applied Xiaoice artificial intelligence technology, most of the feedback from their human "colleagues" has undergone a change, that is, "began to doubt and do not understand the new technology, to be pushed by the leader to do this thing, and then to want to use AI to do a certain piece of business."
He felt, "That's the most exciting thing." Xu Yuanchun also envisions that the business of artificial intelligence "will continue to move forward."
But how far artificial intelligence can go in human society is still only in the imagination. (End)