Could curiosity improve artificial intelligence? While thinking about AI, this question came into my mind. Could curiosity help in developing a true AI? According to this website (for testing creativity):

Curiosity in this context refers to persistent desire to learn and discover new things and ideas. A curious person

always looks for new and original ways of thinking,
likes to learn,
searches for alternative solutions even when traditional solutions are present and available,
enjoys reading books and watching documentaries,
wants to know how things work inside out.


Let's take Clarifai, an image/video classification startup, which can classify images and video with the best accuracy (according to them). If I understand correctly, they trained their deep learning system using millions of images with supervised learning. In the same algorithm, what would happen if we somehow added a &quot;curiosity factor&quot; when the AI has difficulty in classifying an image or its objects? It would ask a human for help, just like a curious child.
Curiosity makes a human being learn new things and also helps to generate new original ideas. Could the addition of curiosity change Clarifai into a true AI?
Does this addition of curosity changes clarifai into a true AI?


As per my answer to this question, we don't know what the ingredients for a 'true AI' are. Via the Turing Test and its variants, the best we can do is "know one when we see one".

Curiosity certainly appears necessary for intelligence, though it doesn't seem sufficient - a lemming-like creature curious to see what's at the bottom of a steep cliff might not survive long enough to learn caution, even if it had the learning mechanisms to do so.

Here is some work by Schmidhuber on Artificial Curiousity. 

Pierre-Yves Oudeyer has also done quite a lot of work on this and Active Learning/Intrinsic motivation.