Made my day, this did …
El Reg on the profane Watson:
Watson is perhaps the most sophisticated artificial intelligence computer system developed to date. In addition to its quiz-show triumph, it has already been put to work on a variety of real-world business scenarios, including analyzing customer data for the finance industry and helping doctors diagnose and treat patients.
Part of what makes Watson’s problem-solving ability seem so uncanny is its advanced natural language processing capabilities, which allow it to understand the complexities of unstructured data. But as Fortune reports, IBM researcher Eric Brown learned that there are limits to how well Watson can interpret human communication.
In an effort to broaden the range of texts that Watson could interpret, Brown tried teaching it the Urban Dictionary, that crowdsourced compendium of words that tend to totter on the bleeding edge of modern English speech. WCGW?
Brown soon found that while Watson is fast with facts, it’s none too quick to pick up on the subtleties of slang. Worse, like any schoolchild, the 6-year-old Watson was all too eager to try out the new words it had learned.
Almost immediately, Watson began casually dropping profanity into its everyday speech, such as answering one researcher’s query with the less-than-scientific term “bullshit.” (Although, to be fair, Watson may be sharper than the IBMers care to admit – just not particularly tactful.)
Filed under: Chuckles, Technology & ideas
Oh dear, I can see it coming. Watson is going to do that American thing of making a rude allusion to a pack animal instead of using a perfectly fine four letter English word with an excellent provenance in its early literary use by Roger Bacon.
Bacon wrote a ditty about a social climber of his day in which he said: “He doth make like an ape. The higher he doth climb, the more he doth show his arse.”