Google, ye know too much!!
By chance I discovered this strange tool in Google Labs this evening. Called "Google Sets", it's basically a clever little online gadget that suggests larger sets of things based on the examples you give.
So, you might type in (as I did) words like "apple", "banana", "orange", "pear", "plum". At it does it's quasi-AI thing and churns out words like "grapefruit", "apricot", "melon", etc.
So far, so "hmm interesting but pretty pointless".
I guessed Google was getting these sets of words by mining it's enormous search database, so I thought I'd see just how clever it is. I thought I'd see if it could predict tranny names, based on a small random set of names of me and some friends.
I typed in: Joanna, Siobhan, Becky, Isobel, Stephanie.
It generated: clarissa, jane, connie, alex, penny, pandora, chrissy, gillian, laura
At which point I generated: "eep".
That isn't just a random set of names, it's a set of people that I know quite well. Apart from Alex, but that strangely makes the whole thing more creepy, it's not just like Google went and found a list I'd written somewhere that included those 5 names. And I'm pretty sure that there's nowhere online that all those words are written down together. So it's done some kind of freaky AI mojo and worked out that those names "belong" together because they crop up together quite often. Spook!
Google credo may be "don't be evil", but it still manages to scare the hell out of me from time to time.
So, you might type in (as I did) words like "apple", "banana", "orange", "pear", "plum". At it does it's quasi-AI thing and churns out words like "grapefruit", "apricot", "melon", etc.
So far, so "hmm interesting but pretty pointless".
I guessed Google was getting these sets of words by mining it's enormous search database, so I thought I'd see just how clever it is. I thought I'd see if it could predict tranny names, based on a small random set of names of me and some friends.
I typed in: Joanna, Siobhan, Becky, Isobel, Stephanie.
It generated: clarissa, jane, connie, alex, penny, pandora, chrissy, gillian, laura
At which point I generated: "eep".
That isn't just a random set of names, it's a set of people that I know quite well. Apart from Alex, but that strangely makes the whole thing more creepy, it's not just like Google went and found a list I'd written somewhere that included those 5 names. And I'm pretty sure that there's nowhere online that all those words are written down together. So it's done some kind of freaky AI mojo and worked out that those names "belong" together because they crop up together quite often. Spook!
Google credo may be "don't be evil", but it still manages to scare the hell out of me from time to time.
But you're right, that is damn creepy!
It's not so much the fact that it comes up with a set of associated names, but that it appears to recognise the context of these words and makes use of that meaning.
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