What Disney's Cutest Robot Means for the Future

Disney’s new bipedal robot 🎬 could have waddled out of a cartoon

Hey Everyone,

In an era of fanciful Generative A.I., large language models and robotics, even Disney is living up to its reputation.

Is this a precursor to social robots? If you think about it, Disney has designed with this robot those specific motions that convey emotions, character, and personality, using all the little designs ‘tricks’ that have made Disney successful in animation for decades. But if this is magic, how will the social robots of the future deceive us?

In machine learning terms, this means the robot is a triumph of Adversarial Motion Prior (AMP): a technique that learns the human preference by training a classifier on what we consider "emotional & cute". How far will the consumer robots of the future hack our tendency to anthropomorphize everything, even in a world that has been stripped of its humanity and tribal intimacy.

According to Nvidia researcher Jim Fan, AMP in GAN literature, this is called a discriminator. Disney artists are good at creating such a dataset. You can then add AMP as an auxiliary reward in simulation to nudge the robot towards desired behaviors.

According to Meta’s ‘Group Director’ Martin Harbech, with advancements like this, it’s not hard to imagine a not-too-distant future where robot companions with unique personalities are able to assist us in a range of tasks - from fun and play to homework and knowledge. One wonders what is the right interface for GPT-4 like technology to arrive for the masses?

Ghost in the Shell of Simulated Artificial Empathy

Is it an A.I. device or more properly the robots that will make up our environment in the not-so-distant future? An ambient future where A.I. is everywhere and is more than just large language models in apps, awkward chatbots, ‘augmented’ products and ever more capable or intelligent software. Disney’s robot makes us wonder about how we will relate to the ghost in the shell of the machines of the machine age.

What happens when robots and LLM entities develop their own uniqueness? What is the limit of the character in the A.I.? Will that imbue them with soul? Will so-called compassion robots earn the privilege of having rights? Character.AI, the a16z-backed AI chatbot startup from ex-Google AI researcher wants us to converse with chatbots in groups, Group Chat feature, as it’s called, allowing users to create a group chat with their favorite AI characters only or it can feature a mix of both humans and AI companions, the company says.

It begs a lot of questions. What happens to human intimacy in a symphony of chatbots, AIs, robots with animations and so-called AGI around every corner?

The Robot with an “IT-Factor”

Disney’s Wall-E like robot has no official name, but combines procedural animation, modular hardware, and reinforcement learning to be able to design and program a walking character capable of these unique gaits and traits.