Teach it the internet says people.....

[Jay481985]

http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/01/ibms-watson-memorized-the-entire-urban-dictionary-then-his-overlords-had-to-delete-it/267047/

IBM's Watson Memorized the Entire 'Urban Dictionary,' Then His Overlords Had to Delete It

By Alexis C. Madrigal

inShare88


Jan 10 2013, 12:26 PM ET

98

You don't even want to know, they should have explained.

Jeopardy/Alexis C. Madrigal

Humans talk funny. We invent words. We smash words together, tear
them apart, abbreviate them one way, then another. Which is great and
fun, if you're a human. Not so great if you are a machine or the kind of
human who programs machines to understand language.

Related Story

And so, when IBM's famous artificial intelligence, Watson, he/she/it
of Jeopardy-winning fame, was in development, its head researcher had a
great idea. Humans created this repository of slang, The Urban Dictionary.
For example, today on the site, we learn that 'healthy gas' is "the gas
(fart) produced from a person who has eaten healthy foods like cabbage,
beans, broccolli, grains, or other high fiber, high carbohydrate
foods."

Brown realized that this formalization of informal
language might be a great way for Watson to understand the way real
people communicate. So, he and his team, fed the whole thing into their
AI.

But one problem. Informal language has a tendency to be
dirty, nasty language. Its insults and cuss words, new names for gross
old things, old names for gross new things, etc. And so, we learn from
Fortune's Michal Lev-Ram, they had to delete all that human messiness from Watson's memory.

Watson

couldn't distinguish between polite language and profanity -- which the

Urban Dictionary is full of. Watson picked up some bad habits from

reading Wikipedia as well. In tests it even used the word "bullshit" in

an answer to a researcher's query.

Ultimately, Brown's 35-person

team developed a filter to keep Watson from swearing and scraped the

Urban Dictionary from its memory.