You Can’t Spell Artificial Intelligence Without ‘Art’

Mankind has always been obsessed with Artificial Intelligence. From computer games to Deep Blue, Deeper Blue, really REALLY Deep Blue to ‘Oh My God this is sooooo incredibly Deep’ Blue, we’ve tried and tried to copy the human brain and create a tin can that can think just like a real person. Thus far, the best use was in those horrible Furby’s that ‘learned’ from each other’s behavior and annoyed the hell out of anybody within 50 feet, but still, it’s nice to see that all the money invested in the technology gets used in a wise way.

Where am I getting with all of this. Well, this morning I wrote an article on a website called Couchsurfing (you should read it, it’s really good). The people that register and use this site refer to themselves as ‘couchsurfers’. For obvious reasons, both the site and the user are more commonly referred to as CS and CS’er. As a well trained ACP’er (please tell me this is the correct acronym for Associated Content Publisher) I used the spell checker on my article. To my surprise, the suggested alternatives for CS’er were not exactly what I expected. Top suggestion was ‘cocksucker’, followed closely by ‘cucumber’.

Now I’m not a person who gets easily offended, and it made me laugh more than anything else, but still, especially suggestion number one is quite rude and not something you’d expect the spell checker to come up with in reference to this article. I’m not even too sure whether there is any censorship that will block this article because I wrote the word. Besides the rudeness of it, the relevancy of it escapes me completely.

Ok, you’re typing your text, you want to type ‘cucumber’, but for some reason CS’er comes out. Does that really happen? Oh, CS’er, no idea what that means, they probably wanted to type cucumber. Is this a practical joke from the guy who programmed the whole dictionary thing? Did he miss a promotion or get in a fight with his boss and wanted to get back at him? Whatever the true reason is, I just don’t see how anybody could type CS’er, run the spell checker and then go: ‘Gee, thanks Mr. AI, I really wanted to type cocksucker here, a good thing you’re still awake, my article would have made no sense whatsoever….’

And this is just one word. I’m sure there must be hundreds of these weird combinations in the whole dictionary thing. Is it a conspiracy? Or just an error on the server and it wasn’t really supposed to come up with that suggestion. Computers do tend to have a mind of their own sometimes. Secretly I actually do hope that it is the program’s AI that got a bit confused. Ever since playing PS3 games, the AI enemies are getting way to smart for me. And revenge is sweet.

P.S. Interestingly enough, when I ran this article through the spell checker, both fore mentioned alternatives had mysteriously disappeared….