I suppose this was bound to happen sooner or later. As our technological overlords continue to create increasingly autonomous Artificial Intelligence and begin combining it with alarmingly realistic, human-looking robots, one of them was eventually going to start getting a little "frisky," right? That may or may not be what happened at a recent technology festival in Saudi Arabia, but it's certainly what it looked like. A female reporter was filming a segment featuring an autonomous robot named "Mohamad" and speaking to the camera when the robot suddenly raised its hand and either grabbed or stroked her butt, for lack of a better term. The reporter looked briefly startled and moved away from the robot but then bravely soldiered on with her report. This definitely raises a number of questions as to just what was going on at that moment, however. (NY Post)

A “fully autonomous” AI robot has raised eyebrows after appearing to grope a reporter during an interview at a technology festival in Saudi Arabia.

Journalist Rawya Kassem was speaking in front of the robot, named Mohammad, when the machine seemed to move to touch her behind, a video circulating on social media shows.

Kassem, visibly startled, quickly moved away from the robot, but not before holding up her hand and motioning it to stop. She then continued on with her presentation at DeepFest, an AI event taking place in Riyadh.

Mohammad was created by robotics firm QSS and they are claiming that this wasn't their fault. They say the robot is "completely autonomous" and it takes actions “independently without direct human control.” (More on that in a moment.) Perhaps this was something random, but it certainly looked as if the robot was making a direct move toward the lady's backside. You can watch the video for yourself here.

Saudi Arabia's first male robot appears to inappropriately touch a female reporter pic.twitter.com/Ph08JStNYC

— Historic Vids (@historyinmemes) March 8, 2024

We've covered a number of examples of this latest generation of robots here in the past. I know that the developers have endeavored to make them act in a more "humanlike" fashion. One thing they do is program them to perform seemingly random movements and facial gestures and motions the way humans do when they are standing around rather than remaining fixed like a statue until they suddenly begin speaking. So perhaps that hand motion was simply an example of that sort of action. 

But even if that's the case, the robot is equipped with optical sensors to identify and interact with things in its environment. It should have known that the reporter was standing right there. We're constantly hearing about the need to build "guardrails" into AI to avoid future catastrophes. Wouldn't you think that "don't initiate physical contact with a human" would be near the top of the list? That's pretty much straight out of Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics. 

They're calling Mohammed a "male" robot, which gives this incident all the more of a look of being potentially sinister. But the AI programs don't really have a gender unless the developers choose to assign the appearance of one. They're just processing a mountain of data at blistering speeds. The idea that they could exhibit traits of sexual attraction, to say nothing of specifically heterosexual impulses still seems a bit far-fetched. Unless, of course, the developers fed that sort of trait into the data library.

We've also seen too many AI systems getting up to all manner of hijinks in the past to simply assume that this was entirely random. We've been told repeatedly by the leading experts in this field that AI has advanced to the point that they're not entirely sure what it's doing at all times or why it does what it does. We've also been informed that the "tendencies" of the AI are not entirely random, but are influenced by the choices made by the people who select all of the data that winds up being loaded into its massive library. Perhaps the people programming Mohammed weren't all that respectful of women's personal boundaries. After all, this is Saudi Arabia we're talking about.

Even if the robot was acting with intent and purpose, what could be done about it? Would the reporter be able to bring a lawsuit or could the authorities become involved? The programmers will continue to insist that they aren't responsible because the AI is acting of its own volition. And it's already been established that you can't take an AI system to court. Both the robot and its creators may be untouchable by the law. Let that sink in for a moment.

Plenty of people on social media are chuckling about this incident and I'll have to confess to being one of them. After all, there wasn't really all that much harm done and the reporter didn't seem very put off. But that was only the case in this one specific incident. What if the next one reveals a bit more violent impulses? What if someone is crazy enough to give one of these AI robots a weapon? (That's actually already happened, but only in military and police applications thus far.) Things could go pear-shaped quickly and it may be too late to slam the brakes on this experiment at that point.