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Do Algorithms Dreams Of Electric Speech? What Virtual Philip K. Dick Can Teach Us About AI

Charles Towers-Clark

“It seems to me that it is really impossible that it could be me.” The first sentence uttered by PKDeepfake - a virtual Philip K Dick (PKD) in conversation with Dr. Ben Goertzel of SingularityNET - is eerily accurate and self-reflective. Their conversation continues along the same vein of seemingly profound but semi-nonsensical tangents, but the content of what the virtual Philip K Dick is saying is not really the point.

The fact that this system was created using a mixture of different AI “Lego blocks” as Goertzel calls them, and can replicate PKD's words, speech, and facial expressions in conversation is the kind of playful AI development that has played second fiddle to business goals in recent years. Can this kind of unfettered experimentation teach us more about AI and our own consciousness, or will the childlike wonder around AI be forever pushed aside by trends and efficiencies?

Frankenstein’s machine

PKDeepfake is a virtual version of a Philip K Dick robot created in 2005 by David Hanson of Hanson Robotics, and the conversation with Dr. Goertzel (like so many others these days) was conducted in online space instead of on stage with the physical robot. “Our PKD simulation system was created in order to give a smarter mind to the PKD robot that David Hanson created in 2005,” says Dr. Goertzel, “we are playing at the bleeding edge here, but I think the technologies [in the PKD robot] are all going to be operating incredibly smoothly together within a few years’ time at most.” Combining multiple technologies in one place to create this replica of one of the world’s preeminent science fiction authors is indeed a lot more like “playing” than a typical operational AI project, but the neural networks and advanced decision engines involved in creating passable conversation are far from child's play.

“The system involves the OpenCog AI Engine running the GHOST dialogue manager, a transformer neural network trained on PKD's writings, and for the voice, a transformer neural network trained on PKD's voice as recorded in his speeches,” says Dr. Goertzel. This combination gives the system a “neural-symbolic” combination of statistical (neural model based) reasoning and a logical rule-based approach to help improve the natural flow of conversation. The virtual head of Philip K Dick is another element of the system, trained on television interviews and other images of PKD, and while this does not affect the system’s reasoning it certainly brings the conversation to life. Supporting these different systems, and enabling the “Lego block” style of AI development is the SingularityNET platform, which hosts different open source algorithms and then allows users to add new tools or improve upon and replace an existing version. “SingularityNET platform is sort of like one of those Lego tables that little kids can use as platforms for building Lego structures,” says Dr. Goertzel, “and the AI agents running on SingularityNET are the Lego blocks, which can be pieced together into different forms to suit the creator's whims or needs, as was the case with the PKD robot.”

Conversing with chaos

The conversation itself between Dr. Goertzel and PKDeepfake is strange to say the least: after PKDeepfake’s initial disbelief at its own existence, it quickly segues into deeply philosophical and then confusing territory. “The nature of the self is a pretty subtle thing, a lot of its parts are in flux, but that doesn’t tell us much. I remember Mike kept insisting that he was Adam Kadmon, I couldn’t figure out if he was talking about himself or referring to any other part of him. Finally, I looked him up and it turns out he was referring to himself, he said ‘I was only an egg’” says PKDeepfake. But churning out predictable responses, or answering questions as straightforwardly as possible, is not really the point of PKDeepfake. “The system is very much an artistic experiment and not a polished final work,” Dr. Goertzel explains, “it's not entirely simple to tell if the neural net is being wacky in a PKD-ish way or just in a neural-nettish way. That's really the fun and art of the PKD simulation to me.”

By using source material as “wacky” as Philip K Dick’s writings and interviews, and giving the system more freedom to build what it sees as conversational responses based on these inputs, the team behind this project have intentionally left the algorithm’s outputs open to interpretation. As opposed to exploring AI in a goal-driven, business minded manner which often creates a functional and limited AI, PKDeepfake is more about seeing what AI is capable of, and how close we can get to realistic, organic conversation that does not involve commercial sales or support. “Current neural net language models have quite limited semantic understanding of anything, but there are still some parallels between the way PKD mused and meandered and the ways a current neural language model muses and meanders,” says Dr. Goertzel. That comparison is really the value of this project as well, to explore how an algorithm might think similarly to a human if given the right tools (the GHOST dialogue manager) and the right source material (PKD’s own meanderings and musings). Trying to respond to sometimes nonsensical and completely unexpected outputs from PKDeepfake is not a flaw in the system, it is the system.

Why so serious?

Despite being seen as a mainstay of the serious and high-stakes business world, AI development remains a playful and fluid thing. The playful artistry present in AI should be nurtured to create such seemingly frivolous algorithms as PKDeepfake - because this is how AI advances, and how we learn so much more about machine intelligence and our own ways of thinking.

Far from optimizing industrial machinery or enabling a shift to new business models, the team behind PKDeepfake have created a puzzle and a sculpture that can be pondered over and, importantly, continuously improved over time. If AI only ever develops to solve business needs or to help consumers, we will get incredibly advanced trend-analysts and shop-assistants that sit firmly within the limits of what AI can do. But if we are to use AI to its full potential and explore what it is capable of doing, then these artistic experiments with AI need to keep happening, and might even shed some light on our own chaotic consciousness.


