From Assistant to Master: Unleashing ChatGPT’s Robot Design Skills

European researchers have conducted an experiment to explore the potential collaboration between humans and artificial intelligence (AI) in solving societal problems. Assistant Professor Cosimo Della Santina and PhD student Francesco Stella from TU Delft, along with Josie Hughes from EPFL, partnered with ChatGPT, a large language model (LLM), to design a robot that could address the challenge of securing a stable food supply in the future. Through a series of question-and-answer sessions, the researchers and the AI bot worked together to identify tomatoes as a crop that could be grown and harvested by robots, offering a solution to the problem. The collaboration demonstrated the potential for AI to provide valuable insights and intuition in areas where human expertise may be lacking. However, it also raised concerns about the control and biases associated with AI systems. The experiment highlighted the need for careful consideration of the ethical and engineering implications of relying on AI for decision-making.