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OK, maybe we were wrong. Maybe our AI isn't demonic or ushering in the end of days. Maybe it's just horny.
We've all fallen foul of autocorrect at some point. Even though Google nobly protects us from a long and frankly bizarre list of words – including, among others, "butt" and "LSAT" – sometimes fate just decides that today is the day we text our mom: "sorry, can't visit, getting dick."
The gods of NSFW had Cory Doctorow in their sights last week, as he took to Twitter to describe how an apparently innocent text to his babysitter nearly ended up as a much more incriminating request.
His fellow Twitterers quickly rose to the occasion, offering screenshots that seemed to back up Cory's report.
Google has been trying to put their honestly terrifying amounts of data in recent years to use by making its Gboard keyboard easier and quicker for cunning linguists on the go. The company says that its predictions are based on a general algorithm coming together with personalized predictions based on the user's typing history – although Doctorow claims otherwise.
Of course, there's every chance the AI is just a huge Monty Python fan, but, whatever the reason, Google says they promise to thrash out a fix for the kinky software as quickly as possible.
"Gboard is designed to avoid such predictions in its generic models, but human language is complex, and as with any sort of system that filters sensitive phrases, sometimes inappropriate suggestions make it through into the machine learning models," a spokesperson told BuzzFeed News. "When we learn of an inappropriate suggestion we work quickly to remove it."
There's an easy fix if you want to stop this kind of thing going down on your own devices – by playing with your personal settings, you can turn off or change the keyboard suggestions at the touch of a button. And if raunchy robots are actually your thing, then we've got good news as well – this is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to NSFW AI.
