Google is training artificial intelligence to predict human behaviour by ‘binge-watching’ YouTube
Computers are being shown videos of humans in natural surroundings. Google hopes this will help them understand exactly what we're up to - and what we might do next.
GOOGLE is teaching its artificial intelligence about human behaviour by making it watch lots of YouTube videos.
It's training super smart algorithms to detect certain gestures, so it can identify actions like swigging a beer, kissing or sitting down.
So it makes sense that Google is teaching its machines using its own resources.
Some might recoil in horror at the thought that the musings of PewDiePie and Zoella could help our future robot overlords figure out how we tick.
But thankfully, the clips are just used to refine computer "gesture recognition", which means using lots of action shots to help algorithms detect exactly what humans are doing.
A database of 57,600 clips have been compiled for the AI to learn from.
Google said this would help it understand "what humans are doing, what they might do next and what they are trying to achieve".
Each three-second clip in the database, named AVA, comes from TV shows and movies that were popular internationally.
A Google spokesperson said: "Despite exciting breakthroughs made over past years in classifying and finding objects in images, recognising human actions still remains a big challenge.
"This is due to the fact that actions are, by nature, less well-defined than objects in videos.
"We hope that the release of AVA will help improve the development of human action recognition systems in the future."
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