Sophia (robot)

Sophia was first activated on Valentine's Day, Social media users have used Sophia's citizenship to criticise Saudi Arabia's human rights record. In 2021 a self-portrait created by Sophia sold for nearly US$700,000 at auction. In 2019 to 2020, Hanson released "Little Sophia" as a companion that could teach children how to code, including support for Python, Blockly, and Raspberry Pi. == Software ==

Sophia's intelligence software is designed by Hanson Robotics. Goertzel has described the AI methods that Sophia uses, which include face tracking and emotion recognition, with robotic movements generated by deep neural networks. Sophia's dialogue is generated via a decision tree, and is uniquely integrated with these outputs. The software has been programmed to give pre-written responses to specific questions or phrases, like a chatbot. These responses are used to create the illusion that the robot is able to understand conversation, including stock answers to questions like "Is the door open or shut?" Sophia's AI program analyses conversations and extracts data that allows her to improve responses in the future. In 2017 Hanson Robotics announced plans to open Sophia to a cloud environment using a decentralized blockchain marketplace. Around January 2018 Sophia was upgraded with functional legs and the ability to walk. In 2019 Sophia displayed the ability to create drawings, including portraits. A paper describing of one of Sophia's open-source subsystems, called "Open Arms", was submitted to 36th Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS 2022). == Appearances and interviews ==

Sophia has appeared on 60 Minutes with Charlie Rose, Good Morning Britain with Piers Morgan, and outlets like CNBC, Forbes, Mashable, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, The Guardian, and the Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. Sophia was featured in AUDI's annual report and was featured on the cover of the December 2016 issue of ELLE Brasil. Musk said on Twitter that Sophia should watch The Godfather and asked "what's the worst that could happen?" At the 2018 Consumer Electronics Show a BBC News reporter described talking with Sophia as "a slightly awkward experience". In May 2018 the photographer Giulio Di Sturco did a photo shoot of Sophia which appeared in National Geographic. == Citizenship quandary ==

Saudi Arabia's granting citizenship to Sophia immediately raised questions, as commentators wondered whether this implied that Sophia could vote or marry, or whether a deliberate system shutdown could be considered murder. Some sources characterised the move as a publicity stunt on the part of the Saudi government to promote the conference. A graduate student named Tyler L. Jaynes writes that there was a "lack of universal acceptance of Sophia the Robot's citizenship and its portrayal and acceptance as a public relations stunt". Simon Nease, writing in the Penn Political Review, suggests that it was a competitive move on the part of Saudi Arabia to attract AI and robotics companies to the country, noting that "Japan has also made preliminary provisions for AI obtaining citizenship". The British Council has published an article, "Should robots be citizens?", which notes that Sophia was issued a passport and goes on to address the "legal quandary" of robot citizenship. == Criticism ==

According to Quartz, experts who have reviewed the robot's partially open-source Goertzel has also acknowledged that it is "not ideal" that some think of Sophia as having human-equivalent intelligence, but argues Sophia's presentation conveys something unique to audiences, saying "If I show them a beautiful smiling robot face, then they get the feeling that AGI may indeed be nearby and viable" ==In popular culture==

Sophia has appeared in videos and music videos, including The White King, and as the lead female character in the American popular music singer Leehom Wang's music video A.I. A Sophia lookalike was portrayed by the American drag performer Gigi Goode in the "Snatch Game" episode of the twelfth season of ''RuPaul's Drag Race (2020). Goode won the episode with her character "Maria the Robot", based heavily on Sophia and named after a robot featured in the Fritze Lang film Metropolis''. In 2022 Sophia collaborated with the Italian artist Andrea Bonaceto. For this project he created digital portraits of Sophia and her creators, which were then processed by Sophia's neural network to produce a unique output that evolved from Bonaceto's original artworks. Bonaceto then created a series of non-fungible tokens (NFTs) as video loops displaying the evolution of the work, starting with drawings by Bonaceto, morphing into the robot interpretation, and then transitioning back to Bonaceto's work. The cornerstone piece of the release "Sophia Instantiation" was auctioned on the NFT platform Nifty Gateway for US$688,888. In 2023 Sophia was featured at the entrance of the BOSS Techtopia Fashion Show. == See also ==