Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba's artificial intelligence (AI) bot, named Ai, made its public debut on Friday, by accurately predicting all three top finalists and the grand winner in China's "I Am a Singer" reality singing show.
During the four-hour finale of the TV programme on Friday evening, Ai worked to predict the winners, analysing factors such as audio from the singers, audience feedback, and sentiment expressed on social media; all while the 500-strong live audience, who served as judges, deliberated. Ai's predictions were displayed live during the finale.
Ai is co-developed by Dr Min Wanli, chief scientist for artificial intelligence at Aliyun, or Alibaba Cloud, who also held a research position at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center.
According to Min, Ai's performance has improved since a test run on 1 April - during the previous episode of "I Am a Singer" - when it accurately predicted the top two winners, but it's third-place forecast was incorrect.
"The results demonstrated that Ai is making significant progress to understand human emotions and how people make decisions," said Min in a statement following the finale.
While Ai is popularly compared to other tech giants' AI bots, namely Google's AlphaGo - known for beating Lee Sedol, human world champion of Chinese strategy boardgame Go, in October - Min asserts that predicting human decisions relating to the arts is different to trumping humans in strategic logic competitions.
"Unlike AlphaGo, which follows very strict rules, there are no ground rules with music and art," Min told the Wall Street Journal's China Real Time, adding that Ai has been trained to "understand emotion and music".
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