Not everyone is thrilled about adding a speaking robot dog to our world.

Boston Dynamics’ Merging of Robotics with ChatGPT Creates Paradigm Shift

Since the advent of ChatGPT into our daily lives, it feels like the pace of computers, computing, and computer stories has sped up to 1,000 miles per hour. OpenAI said it went from zero users to 100 million practically overnight.

Brace yourself—more change is soon to come. In an article from futurism.com, the latest is that SpotGPT has arrived.

A team of programmers just equipped a Boston Dynamics robot dog with OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Text-to-Speech voice modulation, allowing it to literally speak to them and answer their questions.

In a video posted to Twitter, machine learning engineer Santiago Valdarrama showcased how he and a colleague programmed a Spot robot dog to verbally answer system questions with the help of OpenAI’s extremely popular tool.

“These robots run automated missions every day,” Valdarrama explained in his Twitter thread, noting that each mission includes “miles-long, hard-to-understand configuration files” that only engineers can understand. “That’s where ChatGPT comes in,” he continued. “We show it the configuration files and the mission results. We then ask questions using that context. Put that together with a voice-enabled interface, and we have an awesome way to query our data!”

Even the author of this piece admits that he thinks robodogs are creepy, but to give them a voice increases the creepy by a factor of 10.

Part of the Plan

After seeing many of the robots that Boston Dynamic has invented and seeing the unbelievable things they can do, it’s easy to be concerned about all our futures.  These bots perform jumps and physical movements that no human could possibly copy. Now they will have the ability to make snide comments about our puny human abilities.

While SpotGPT does feel like it’s bringing us one tiny step closer to the robot uprising, integrating the chatbot into robots has always been a part of the plan.

In February, Microsoft, which signed a multi-billion dollar deal with OpenAI, released a paper outlining design principles for ChatGPT integration into robotics.

“We believe that our work is just the start of a shift in how we develop robotics systems,” the company’s announcement reads, “and we hope to inspire other researchers to jump into this exciting field.”

In other words, it was only a matter of time until somebody gave Spot its own voice. Don’t be surprised if someone invents a talking robotic horse calling it Mr.EdGPT.

read more at futurism.com