“We spend a lot of time talking to Alexa and Siri. Imagine if such artificial personalities were put inside a cute, adorable robot. That’s what Alexander Reben has done. The artist created what he saw as the perfect interview machine to see how much he could get people to reveal to the robot.” – Laura Sydell

“Questions like, “If a human can learn from a copyrighted book, can a machine learn from [it] as well?,” Reben recently posited to Engadget. Much of Reben’s art, supported by non-profit Stochastic Labs, seeks to raise such conundrums. “Doing something that’s provocative and doing something that’s public, I think, starts the conversation and gets them going in a place where the general public can start thinking about them,” he told Engadget.” – Andrew Tarantola

“Alexander Reben’s mesmerizing five-minute film Deeply Artificial Trees, 2017, is basically Bob Ross on acid: The beloved late painter’s brushstrokes lay down rapidly morphing images of happy little pines, scorpions, puppies, and sinister birds of prey as Bob talks backward, or possibly in tongues. Using a Google visualization program designed to replicate our neural functions, a kind of ayahuasca for artificial intelligence, Reben’s piece taps into our deepest fears and warmest fuzzies simultaneously. It’s also representative of a show preoccupied with the eternal search for higher consciousness and divine light (whether that’s inward, upward, or digital).” – Janelle Zara

“This video was created by Alexander Reben, an engineer turned artist who uses technology to explore how machines are changing the human world and vice versa. It features an episode of the … television show The Joy of Painting with Bob Ross through Google’s neural network DeepDream.
DeepDream is a convolutional neural network, a style of computing inspired by the brain, that identifies and recognizes images and patterns. Most of the time, it’s used to create nightmarish visions like these, but it’s also a surprisingly insightful visualization that shows how computers “think” in regards to tasks like image classification and speech recognition.” – Tom Hale

“Computers don’t dream of electric sheep, they imagine the dulcet tones of legendary public access painter, Bob Ross. Bay Area artist and engineer Alexander Reben has produced an incredible feat of machine learning in honor of the late Ross, creating a mashup video that applies Deep Dream-like algorithms to both the video and audio tracks. The result is an utterly surreal experience that will leave you pinching yourself.” – Andrew Tarantola

“Alexander Reben has created cute cardboard robots that elicit random emotional confessions from passersby, and a bot called The First Law that can decide whether or not to prick an unsuspecting human finger. These are two examples at the opposite ends of the spectrum of what artificial intelligence can one day bring to humanity – and for the artist, engineer and WIRED Innovation Fellow, they are important tools designed to spark debate about what that coexistence will look like.” – Liat Clark

“Reben created this robot because the world is getting closer to a time when robots will make choices about when to harm a human being. Take self-driving cars. Ford Motors recently said it planned to mass produce autonomous cars within five years. This could mean that a self-driving vehicle may soon need to decide whether to crash the car into a tree and risk hurting the driver or hit a group of pedestrians.
“The answer might be that ‘Well, these machines are going to make decisions so much better than us and it’s not going to be a problem,’ ” Reben says. “They’re going to be so much more ethical than a human could ever be.” ” – Laura Sydell

“No one can say for sure what will happen, not even its creator. “I view it as a piece of tangible philosophy,” Reben, a roboticist and artist based in Berkeley, Calif., told The Washington Post by phone early Friday morning. Reben’s devices mix art and technology, often whimsically, like his solar-powered music box that plays “You Are My Sunshine.”
This new machine, however, was not designed for whimsy. It’s the first ever robot to “autonomously and intentionally” break the First Law of Robotics, Reben says on his website. The law, one of a trio of famous science fiction principles created by author Isaac Asimov, declares that robots must not allow harm to befall humans.” – Ben Guarino

“Science fiction author Isaac Asimov came up with the three ‘laws’ of robotics in a story he published in 1942.
The first of these laws says a robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
Now artist and roboticist Alexander Reben has developed the first robot that breaks this rule, by hurting humans in an unpredictable way.” –  Abigail Beall

“But now a Berkeley, California man wants to start a robust conversation among ethicists, philosophers, lawyers, and others about where technology is going–and what dangers robots will present humanity in the future. Alexander Reben, a roboticist and artist, has built a tabletop robot whose sole mechanical purpose is to hurt people. Reben hopes his Frankenstein gets people talking.” – Daniel Terdiman

“Alex Reben came up with 2.5 million ideas in just three days. Nearly all of them are terrible – but he doesn’t mind. He thinks he has found a way to thwart patent trolls by putting their speculative ideas in the public domain before they can make a claim.
In his project, called All Prior Art, Reben, an artist and engineer, uses software to rummage through the US patent database, which is freely available online. The software extracts sentences from patent documents and splices them into phrases that describe new inventions.” – Aviva Rutkin

“Frustration with the patent system is what prompted inventor, artist and MIT-trained roboticist Alexander Reben to create All Prior Art, a website that algorithmically generates and publishes patent-troll-like “prior art.”
If someone tries to patent an invention and the idea has already been published, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office won’t grant them a patent. Reben’s project is trying to cut down on the number of frivolous patents by publishing lots and lots of ideas, and he thinks his database could be used by patent examiners to challenge frivolous patents.” – Laura Sydell

“With a new generation of technology comes a new generation of scientists, scholars, engineers and artists exploring the relationship between people and machines. At the heart of this nexus is Alexander Reben, an MIT-trained roboticist and artist whose work forces us to confront and question our expectations when it comes to ourselves and our creations.” – Tania Lombrozo

“A cute bot can also get people to do things they normally wouldn’t. Alex Reben, an engineer turned artist and another alum of the MIT Media Lab, has been playing with the power of robotic cuteness ever since he designed Boxie for his master’s. Like HitchBot, Boxie used cuteness as an engineering workaround. Robots have a hard time climbing stairs, so Boxie asks humans to carry it up them. To get humans to go out of their way to help a machine, Reben made Boxie cute, combing through the literature to find the optimal proportions — wide eyes, big head, slight smile, childlike voice.” – Josh Dzieza 

“Instead of killing kids during private tours of his fantastical factory, Alex Reben is a Willy Wonka-type character of a different sort. He builds robots for a living—seemingly just for fun—and while some of his creations are certainly distressing, they’re all fun to watch, interact with, or just ponder. The folks at Cool Hunting had the opportunity to check out Alex’s lab, and thankfully, they brought a camera. Most engineers who boast alumni status at both MIT’s Media Lab and NASA would probably go on to develop robots for the military, or build a better Roomba. Alex instead decided to devote his talents to the arts. Some of his robots have a defined purpose, like a cardboard creation that serves as an autonomous documentarian. But others exist just because they can, and that’s ok, because who wouldn’t want to visit their local art gallery if it was full of robots?” – Andrew Liszewski

“In a room piled with resistors, circuit boards and projects in various states of completion, we spoke with talented artist and engineer Alex Reben about his body of work. Reben—an alumni of MIT’s Media Lab and NASA—has moved away from his traditional line of work to apply his engineering expertise to his art. Often exploring the blurred lines of human-machine interaction, Reben’s work is incredibly insightful, humorous and—at times—a little dark.”

https://vimeo.com/99558592

“Robots don’t need to have artificial intelligence and a voice like Scarlett Johansson for people to form emotional bonds with them… In fact, it takes surprisingly little, as Alexander Reben discovered while working on his masters thesis at the MIT Media Lab. His robot BlabDroid looks like a cardboard Wall-E and totters around asking people personal questions. Watching recordings of BlabDroid’s interviews, Reben was struck by the way people opened up to the robot in ways they wouldn’t to a human stranger… Though his work has far-reaching implications for the tech industry, Reben initially found that the best place to pursue his inquiry wasn’t a lab or a startup, but an art gallery.” – Josh Dieza

“That humans would show empathy for the robot is not surprising, because the bot looked and behaved like an animal, roboticist Alexander Reben, founder of the company BlabDroid, LLC and a research affiliate at MIT, told LiveScience. Reben, who was not involved in the recent study, himself builds small cardboard robots that tap into the human affinity for cute creatures.”

“If an adorable robot asked you a series of personal questions (“Who do you love most in the world?” “What really scares you?”), would you be more inclined to answer than if asked by a human?” – Samantha Murphy

“It’s not quite right to describe Robots in Residence as a movie, and it’s not quite fair to put it on this list, since you really need to be in New York to get the full experience. Still, we can’t get over how interesting this project might be: pre-programmed robots, available to festival goers, will work with whoever shows up to direct and film a documentary. They’re not quite monkeys with typewriters, but it’s worth paying attention to what they come up with. Do you need an author to create art?” – Lily Rothman

“The robot apocalypse is coming to cinema. But instead of blowing things up on the big screen, the BlabDroids are attempting to make what could be the first documentary ever filmed and directed by robots.” – Angela Watercutter

“My personal favorite may be “Robots in Residence,” because it involves cute little robots. … Brent Hoff, a filmmaker who was sitting at the “Robots in Residence” residence—at the time of my visit, still only a table on which sat what appeared to be a corrugated box of the sort one might use to send a friend a fruitcake through the U.S. Mail, though this one had a lens, wheels and buttons—explained that this was to be “the first documentary directed entirely by robots.”
Humans are involved, however, in that they need to shepherd the bots about, and confess their thoughts and feelings to them every so often. “People say anything to artificial intelligence,” he added.” – Ralph Gardner

“Those cute little robots are part of filmmaker Brent Hoff and robo-artist Alexander Reben’s “Robots in Residence” (pictured above), a project that tasks its automatons with filming and directing a documentary drawn from conversations with festgoers.” – Gordon Cox

“The tiny robots have a smiling face and are programmed with the voice of a seven-year-old boy, who bartered his services in exchange for his very own Blabdroid, Hoff said in an interview with CBC’s As It Happens. CBC’s Helen Mann talks to Hoff about the film project, and lets the robot turn the tables and ask a few questions of its own.” – Helen Mann

“The interviews captured in another offering, “Robots in Residence,” will be used to make a postfestival documentary, although one of its directors, Alexander Reben, is really in it for the interactivity. The project is based on his master’s thesis, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, about the relationships between robots and people. His co-director, Brent Hoff, is more the bona fide filmmaker; Mr. Reben’s interest is in how Tribeca audiences will deal with robots that are calculated to be cute.” – John Anderson

“Designed at MIT’s Media Lab, Boxie is an adorable cardboard robot that films you with its eyes”

“Imagine a cardboard version of Pixar’s Wall-e character, but with added über-cute human voice, and you’ve got a fair picture of Boxie, Alexander Reben’s documentary-video-making robot. Designed to wander the streets shooting video, the diminutive droid trundles up to people and asks them to tell it an interesting story. Sounds crazy? Surprisingly, not entirely: a good few people did actually cooperate with Boxie – enough to make a short movie – though one malcontent dumped the robot in a trash can and a child tried to kidnap it.” – Paul Marks