Athena Humanoid Robot Creation
Unfortunately at the time of writing, no successful collaboration with humanoid robot manufacturers has been secured. See Appendix V and VI. Therefore it was necessary to ‘invent’ a fictitious robot with a sympathetic backstory. The idea was to create something that was similar and aligned well with the ‘Can’t Help Myself’ Robot by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. The Wonder AI software (text to image generation app) was used to create Athena the Humanoid Robot. The name was based on the now defunct Athena posters as their business model dealt with images. This seemed to be a fitting name for the robot.
Text Used to Create Athena
The text used to generate Athena below was as follows: “Beautiful female, humanoid robot with sad eyes, surrounded by evil scientists. After numerous regenerations based on the above text the following images of Athena were chosen”.
Narrative Generation
Athena required a ‘cover’ or sad ‘backstory’ to align with the robotic arm ‘Can’t Help Myself’ created by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu. Below is the story that was crested on the Facebook Post.
Here’s today’s poll: A super sad story! On my research journey, I came across Athena, who appears in the pictures below. She is a humanoid robot who has been exploited by her makers for her ability to create quite otherworldly beautiful AI art. Unlike Ai-Da, the famous art-creating robot, Athena is not well known at all, and I only stumbled across her by chance during my research. Athena is tasked each day to create more and more beautiful art, and she is under the threat of being ‘switched off’ if she does not perform! Her makers are wanting to see if this improves the art she produces because she is in fact slowly becoming sentient. Knowing her impending ‘switch off,’ she quoted the famous line from Blade Runner:
‘I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe. Attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhäuser Gate. All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.’
They want to switch her off because it’s too soon to have a sentient Robot. Please tell me, do you like her art? Please comment either beautiful or soulless, or any other comments are welcome. I feel I want to set up a change.org to save her.”
Results
Please see Image Poll #4 for the results of Athena’s sad story and how this impacted on the study.