REAL LIFE NEWS: THE FOUL-MOUTHED COMPUTER
by Hazed
Have you heard the phrase “Garbage in, garbage out” (GIGO) when talking about computers? It means that what a computer produces is completely dependent on the data that is input to it.
In the case of IBM’s Watson supercomputer, what was fed to the computer resulted in it learning to swear - a lot!
The computer is best known for having defeated human opponents at the game of Jeopardy! (which I believed is based on the popular Fed game Fedpardy!) When Eric Brown, an IBM research assistant who is the “brains” behind Watson, and his team wanted to get the supercomputer to sound more human, they decided to feed it the Urban Dictionary. Sounds like a good idea: adding slang terms to its vocabulary might do the job of humanising it.
Unfortunately, they overlooked just how many obscene entries there are in the Urban Dictionary. Mixed among the useful phrases like teen slang and internet abbreviations is a lot of filth. And Watson couldn’t distinguish the polite from the profanity.
The result was a computer that threw overly-crass language into its responses at random points. Brown and the team had to take the Urban Dictionary entries out of Watson’s memory, to turn it polite again!
Source: http://www.ibtimes.com/ibms-watson-gets-swear-filter-after-learning-urban-dictionary-1007734
