Barbie AI: "Has Anyone in Your Family Married a Clown, Barbie?"

For some strange reason, I was under an earlier impression that Barbie was available with a 3D printer. I sent this tidbit to my comedic friend who said she wanted one so she could print a new boyfriend. When I did a search for such an announcement today, though, nothing came up. Was this my own imagined conversation?

In contrast, I just read the Sunday NY Times article about the work on the forthcoming  artificial intelligence (AI) featured Barbie, which manufacturers hope to release to the market for this year’s holiday sales: http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/20/magazine/barbie-wants-to-get-to-know-your-child.html?_r=0

The sophisticated development follows the path of other intelligent response systems by capturing interactions with the product with humans, then storing and analyzing the responses into a database, along with potential responses to the questions or remarks.

If you’ve ever called a real-time help desk, you are also likely to have benefitted from this type of a knowledge database as the help-desk person looked up your question.

This same protocol can be used for smart tutors/assistants in learning applications.

And it makes sense for the goals of a customer helpdesk or learning support.

But back to talking with toys, their companionship, and the potential to shape behavior. Toys have been the training ground for generations, in addition to providing diversions.

And yes, many of us had imaginary dialogue with our toys, creating both sides of it, and unless an adult was in earshot, the conversations went on without record. And then there were the pull –the-string-talkers—ok for a limited while. Of the later toys, one of my favorites was a teddy bear that had a mic, and could repeat whatever you said to good old teddy. My son and daughter each had one—our son would laugh into one, and then face the one bear to the other so they could have one extended ha fest.

Though drawing from her database in a timely fashion, Barbie AI’s programmed responses are drawing on former conversations and ring of the invasion of privacy. To other degrees, a person has to ask whether it’s a good idea to have Barbie harvesting your child’s private thoughts, worries, or genius.

I think of a wunderkind I know, and think of her questions:

“Barbie, I think I want to marry a clown when I grow up. Followed by, “Has anyone in your family married a clown?”

"Barbie, my toy birds are singing to the dead. What songs are they singing?"

I am amused to think how Barbie might respond. And I weigh in by thinking this child’s thoughts are priceless, and, as yet, unincorporated.

OER, Fair Use, and Fair Practice Part III: Flickr Commons and "No Known Copyright Restrictions"

This post explores the difference between using an image under Flickr Commons Commons under fair use vs. commercial purposes.


As I shared in the first post on this topic, I explored Flickr Commons in search of a photo to use for a canvas I was creating for the Jazz-on-Film-with Friends, a memento of a private gathering at my home. 

And here is what I learned from that part of the journey. In the creation of the canvas, I was focused on the use of a Billie Holiday photo I'd found at Flickr Commons under the terms of fair use. And it did answer the following four conditions under fair use:

1) Purpose: The piece was for my personal, non-commercial, non-educational use.

2) Nature: the use of the image from the film did not embody the central intent of the film, and it was used to create something different from the original.

3) Amount: the image on the screen was only one frame of a nearly two-hour long film.

4) Effect: This personal memento would not affect film distribution.

Yet I was struck by the used of the phrase at the Commons, "no known copyright restrictions": http://www.loc.gov/rr/print/195_copr.html#noknown
In reading the fine print, I learned that in the case of these wonderful photos by photographer Gottlieb, he donated his work of something like 1600 photographs of the golden age of jazz. He denoted that as of 2010, these works would go into the public domain, with the exception of those which had already been published by other source.

So here is what it meant for the photo I'd just placed on the canvas above. It had been published by Downbeat magazine, so I wanted to do something commercial with it, I most likely needed their written permissions because the image constitutes a whole work by Mr. Gottlieb.
Upon returning to the Gottlieb collection, I did find this image of Billy Holliday, one not published by anyone else, and since it was 2015, it was truly in the public domain.

Image Source: Library of Congress. Gottlieb Collection. ”Portrait Billie Holiday at Carnegie Hall Between 1946 and 1948.”: http://hdl.loc.gov/loc.music/gottlieb.04261

Once again, here are some resources: (A very helpful Creative Commons 4.0 Fair Use Checklist can be found at the Columbia Site.)

https://delicious.com/constantlearningorg/fairuse

Next: What do the various levels of Creative Commons Licensing mean?