Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2020/07/09/stella-the-talking-dog-is.html
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Sweet, sweet Pittie mix Stella.
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Without going down an entire anthropomorphism rabbit hole, something about this doesn’t click for me. Even assuming an animal has emotions that align with a human’s, I find it hard to believe that “hunger” would be expressed as “mad.”
There’s a pretty long path to walk down there between “I sense that I require food” and that developing into a targeted sense of hostility.
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I think we could bridge the gap with a “hangry” button
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Stella is mad because she knows her video formats and there is no button for “don’t shoot vertical video”. So she just hit the next best button.
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It’s not unreasonable to suppose Stella has some semantic understanding of “mad” which expresses what she’s learnt, but I’d be surprised if it’s the same as yours given her experiences are completely different. You observe this in toddlers where they say not quite the right word but they definitely mean it.
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It looks perfect on my phone.
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Maybe what Stella really means is that she’s gone “mad” (perhaps due to some sort of zombie infection thing), and she’s going to “eat, eat, eat” the nice lady who’s filming her. The video does rather end abruptly before there’s really any sort of resolution.
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I don’t know how many mood buttons there are there. Perhaps “mad” covers a lot more ground in Stellamat than it does in English.
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i don’t know why i was not expecting that to be the reason. dogs are ALWAYS hungry.
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You know, you never think to implement the “brains” button right out of the gate, but once you finally add it, it becomes very illuminating.
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Seems like Stella has done a good job using Pavlovian conditioning on her person.
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My cats would require something a bit stronger than “mad”, I think. Maybe “asshole.”
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Also, how would you even teach the dog to associate the sound of a particular button with their emotional state? It would require a human making an assumption about the dog’s emotional state to teach it to them to begin with. (So the whole thing would fall at the first gate unless the human was really good at determining the dog’s emotion - in which case the whole button system is unnecessary.) Also, there would have to be some reward tied to successfully communicating, so that rather limits what kind of communications could be possible.
I don’t discount the possibility that the dog may be trying to communicate something with the board, but whatever is attempting to be conveyed, it’s almost certainly not the meaning of the English words (with the possible exception of “eat”).
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I don’t know if the dog understand words or just performing actions that they know will give them the desired results.
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Isn’t that what understanding means? The word is just a sound they know will gain them an intended result. Which is what words pretty much are, no?
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And yet we the only way avoid antrhophormizing her is by not losing sight of the fact that Stella can only use the words that are on the board, whatever word gets the desired response should not be confused with an accurate representational of her internal state of mind.
Having said that, yeah, I can believe she would be upset affter watching somebody else eat and eat and eat without sharing.
At some level, there’s functionally no difference is there?
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She have buttons for commenting on Ruth vs. Dimaggio?
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Which button says - squirrel!!!
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They need a new Hangry button for “mad eat.”
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