AI can't read the room

Marketplace All-in-One

Marketplace

News, Business

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 28 April 2025

⏱️ 8 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Leyla Isik, a professor of cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University, is also a senior scientist on a new study looking at how good AI is at reading social cues. She and her research team took short videos of people doing things — two people chatting, two babies on a playmat, two people doing a synchronized skate routine — and showed them to human participants. After, they were asked them questions like, are these two communicating with each other? Are they communicating? Is it a positive or negative interaction? Then, they showed the same videos to over 350 open source AI models. (Which is a lot, though it didn't include all the latest and greatest ones out there.) Isik found that the AI models were a lot worse than humans at understanding what was going on. Marketplace’s Stephanie Hughes visited Isik at her lab in Johns Hopkins to discuss the findings.

Transcript

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1:04.3	awkward. For American public media, this is Marketplace Tech. I'm Stephanie Hughes.
1:21.4	I met up last week with Layla Ischick.
1:24.5	She's a professor of cognitive science at Johns Hopkins University.
1:29.2	I went to visit her lab where she's got some watercolors of brains on the wall.
1:31.1	Good brain art is important.
1:38.0	Ishik's the senior scientist on a new study looking at how good AI is at reading social cues.
1:40.4	She and her research team took short videos.
	...

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