Infants beat AI at detecting human motivations - Futurity

You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Infants outperform artificial intelligence in detecting what motivates other people's actions, according to a new study. The results, which highlight fundamental differences between cognition and computation, point to shortcomings in today's technologies and where improvements are needed for AI to more fully replicate human behavior. "Adults and even infants can easily make reliable inferences about what drives other people's actions," explains Moira Dillon, an assistant professor in New York University's psychology department and the senior author of the paper in the journal Cognition. "Current AI finds these inferences challenging to make." "The novel idea of putting infants and AI head-to-head on the same tasks is allowing researchers to better describe infants' intuitive knowledge about other people and suggest ways of integrating that knowledge into AI," she adds.