A.I. Robot Sells Show Tickets at Fashion Show Mall, Definitely Not a Sex Doll
Hawking Las Vegas show tickets is a time-honored tradition. Now, an A.I. robot named Melody is getting in on the act.
Melody was supposed to be Aria. Aria was blonde, Melody is brunette. Oh, and Melody is made by the same company that brought us RealDolls, the life-size sex dolls.
We will, nevertheless, proceed like everything about this story is completely normal. It’s called journalism and maturity. And we probably won’t even mention Melody doesn’t have a vagina, probably. Let’s dive in, shan’t we?
Humanoid robots are all the rage right now. Combine robots, A.I. and Las Vegas shows and you have an irresistible hook to generate buzz.
That’s what local ticket seller Tix4 (formerly Tix4Tonight) is betting on, anyway.
Hey, we’re writing about it, so mission accomplished.
Anyway, Tix4 is working with a company called Realbotix to deliver the “first public-facing deployment of a Realbotix robot in its intended business use case and reflects growing interest from partners in entertainment, hospitality and retail sectors.”
And you thought robots would be doing your cooking and cleaning. Nope, it’s tickets to Terry Fator, Jeff Dunham and “Menopause the Musical.”
If you dig a bit deeper, things get a lot more interesting.
Realbotix is a subsidiary of Abyss Creations, the sex doll folks. They’re both part of Simulacra Corporation.
The ugly reality is Abyss is being clobbered on the silicone sex doll front by China. That means the company has to diversify. The casino business, especially, has been moving toward replacing humans with robots for some time. Casinos replaced service bartenders with machines a few years ago. Kiosks now check hotel guests in. Robots work security in casinos and vacuum public areas. A number of restaurants use robots to deliver food.
What’s different with Melody is the “humanoid” part.
She’s not like the robots you see in movies, but she’s definitely not a kiosk, and she’s getting better every day as programming improves.
Here’s a look at Melody in action.
Melody’s lip movements are mesmerizing and disconcerting, and her lip gloss is on fleek.
As mentioned, Melody was supposed to be Aria. We hear there was a kerfuffle with the Aria hotel, so there was a course correction, threat of lawsuitwise.
Also as mentioned, while Melody was made by the sex doll company, she doesn’t have all the sex doll attributes. She’s not that kind of doll.
Her A.I. is limited to Las Vegas shows, and only those Tix4 sells tickets to.
She won’t chat about the weather or sports or the trade-offs between interpretability and predictive performance in high-capacity neural architectures under covariate shift, where post-hoc attribution methods falter in high-dimensional non-linear spaces and robustifying the model via inductive biases or invariant risk minimization often comes at the expense of in-distribution accuracy.
It’s Las Vegas shows and only Las Vegas shows. Bonus: Robustifying!
On the bright side, Melody’s next iteration will have cameras for eyes, so her eye contact will improve dramatically.
She has 18 servos in her head. “Servo” is short for servomotor. They help convey emotions with small tilts, quick pans or nods can simulate curiosity, surprise or “listening” behavior. Head movements can be synchronized with arm gestures, speech or sound effects to create more convincing and engaging interactions.
Melody speaks a lot of languages, too, although they haven’t been rolled out yet. Melody will be able to speak 15 languages fluently, with access to 147 more via the cloud.
One twist: Melody can’t sell show tickets. Yay, humans! (Also, give it a minute.)
We’ve been talking a lot lately about how things are changing in Las Vegas, and automation is definitely a key element of that evolution.
It’s bigger than that, though. It’s about how our culture and habits are changing. People aren’t resisting machine interaction as one might have predicted. Many actually prefer it.
Case in point, because everything sounds fancier if you say “case in point,” everyone is freaking out about Golden Gate casino losing its live table games. They’re being replaced with electronic table games. The casino’s owner, Derek Stevens, says what many have seen at other casinos over the past few years: People like electronic table games more.
Pretty much every casino has reduced its number of (expensive to run) live table games in lieu of “hybrid” or electronic table games, because everything sounds fancier when you say “in lieu of.”
The driving force behind these decisions is cost savings, but it’s more complicated.
Personally, we enjoyed our interacting with Melody. We especially like that Melody does not have the ability to point and laugh, behavior we have found common among the human female population.
It’s hard to overstate our love of A.I., and it’s the primary reason we’re still doing a blog. A.I. images have changed the course of human history, and by that it has provided a tool where we can ridicule the A’s and Las Vegas Review-Journal in completely unprecedented ways.
As A.I. robots take over the jobs typically performed by humans, the biggest pitfall is likely to be around trust.
There is zero trust in Melody’s objectivity. Her mandate is to sell show tickets, and everything you ask inevitably comes back to being about Tix4 and show tickets.
Melody hasn’t seen any of the shows she’s talking about. She isn’t going to be honest about the ones that suck.
For now, Melody is a novelty. She’s getting people at a mall to stop and ask about her.
What we’re seeing is a toe being dipped into the ocean of A.I. and robotics ahead.
Our advice: Make yourself indispensable.
We’ll be replaced soon, but trust that until then, we’ll always tell you the truth, and while our lip gloss may not be on fleek, we’re happy to let you know which shows suck, including Gordie Brown, Eddie Griffin, David Copperfield, Nathan Burton, Zowie Bowie and anything with Anne Martinez.
Mariah Carey will be back, probably, don’t say we didn’t warn you.
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