Tech Firms Hire Poets to Humanize AIs

Turns out a "useless" humanities degree can get you a job in Silicon Valley, thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence. The brains behind Apple's Siri, Amazon's Alexa, and Microsoft's Cortana realized that to make their AIs sound more like people, they needed to hire workers whose creativity was less digital and more personal. According to the Washington Post, the teams behind many everyday AIs are made up of poets, writers, and comedians, who help give the robots more personality. Now, we're not saying that Silicon Valley's tech community is full of sociopaths or psychos, but software companies seem to have realized that hiring engineers from fields outside their own can help make their AI's more personable, and it's a much easier way to teach computers to think than turning them loose on the internet, which inevitably turns them into racists. Some companies are taking artificial assistants one step further.