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When an AI Invents Diseases, You End Up With 'Penis Arthritis'

When an AI Invents Diseases, You End Up With 'Penis Arthritis'

7 years ago
Anonymous $wKBR2uNMvM

https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/j559b8/when-an-ai-invents-diseases-you-end-up-with-penis-arthritis

Scary-sounding, futuristic diseases are a time-honored trope of science fiction. But if you're short on ideas, a friendly neural network can help you invent a condition that's adequately unnerving—as long as you give it enough time to learn what sounds disease-y.

Janelle Shane, a research scientist and blogger, recently worked with one of her readers to train a neural network to come up with fake ailments. First, her reader Kate Leroux, a cartographer, scraped 3,765 common names for conditions from an online medical database. Then, Shane fed those into an open-source machine-learning algorithm. The names the algorithm first generated weren't very realistic-sounding: