Alibaba will use its new AI to predict the winner of a TV singing contest

An “I’m a Singer” contestant in action. Image credit: Weibo.

Discussions about artificial intelligence often conjure Terminator-esque images of a world run by super-intelligent machines. But AI can be used for good – like predicting reality TV show winners.

The folks at Alibaba today revealed they’ve tasked their in-house AI with determining who will win this season of I’m a Singer, the wildly popular Chinese reality show. By analyzing mountains of data, the AI aims to know the judges’ opinions before they do – and pick the winning contestant.

Biiiiig data

At first glance, Alibaba’s AI works in a similar way to Twitter-based analytics, which have been used in the past to predict political upsets, stock market shifts, and other stuff based on social media chatter. Using AI to analyze social media networks for predictive purposes isn’t particularly new – it’s even being done by some fairly small startups.

See: This artificial intelligence can detect sarcasm and tell you where to invest your cash

But in addition to studying the opinions and discussions online – which may be able to predict how a candidate would fare if the audience voted – Alibaba’s AI also hopes to outwit the judges’ expert opinions. According to Alibaba, the tech can assess a singer’s “voice pitch and energy,” and weigh that against other factors such as song choice and minute-by-minute audience response.

Alibaba is treating this as a proof-of-concept.

The AI will gather information throughout the I’m a Singer finale, and will present its results in tandem with the human judges.

It’s a lot of data. So much so, in fact, that it seems a bit weird to use this level of sophisticated technology to predict the results of a reality show instead of, say, the stock market or the weather. But Alibaba is treating this as a proof-of-concept.

Created by the ecommerce company’s cloud computing arm, the artificial intelligence – named “Ai” – is slated for more real-world applications in the future, from social trend predictions to personal assistance. The project is headed by Dr. Min Wanli, the chief scientist for AI at Alibaba Cloud, who joined the company in 2013. He has previously held a research role at the IBM TJ Watson Research Center – the place behind the Watson AI. Watson is also a fan of TV.

Perhaps one day Alibaba’s AI will go head-to-virtual-head against Google’s AlphaGo for a good board game – or maybe that’s how the robot apocalypse starts.