{"id":9080,"date":"2017-09-05T05:45:17","date_gmt":"2017-09-05T13:45:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/09\/05\/news-2853\/"},"modified":"2017-09-05T05:45:17","modified_gmt":"2017-09-05T13:45:17","slug":"news-2853","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/2017\/09\/05\/news-2853\/","title":{"rendered":"When an AI Invents Diseases, You End Up With ‘Penis Arthritis’"},"content":{"rendered":"

Credit to Author: Kaleigh Rogers| Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2017 13:06:20 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u2014as long as you give it enough time to learn what sounds disease-y.<\/p>\n

Janelle Shane, a research scientist and blogger, recently worked with one of her readers to train a neural network <\/a>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: <\/p>\n

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But after a few rounds of training, the algorithm started to get smarter, and learned the difference between disease names, body parts, and symptoms. Eventually, it came up with some pretty convincing, sci-fi-sounding conditions:<\/p>\n

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It also had a bit of a predilection for reproductive health conditions, and concocted diseases like “penis arthritis,” “vaginal diffection,” and “orgy fever.” (Shane sent these particular examples to me via email.)<\/p>\n

As often happens with neural networks<\/a>, the project wasn’t a slam dunk. I don’t think the writers of the new Star Trek series<\/a> need to be worried about their jobs. But there’s something earnestly delightful about tasking computers with creative tasks like this. Machines, even learning machines, approach them in such a different way than a human would, and it’s sweet when a computer says “like this? Did I do good?”<\/p>\n

Sure, computer. Let’s pretend Cancer of the Cancer is a thing. <\/p>\n

Get six of our favorite Motherboard stories every day <\/i><\/b> by signing up for our newsletter.<\/i><\/b><\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/motherboard.vice.com\/en_us\/rss<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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Credit to Author: Kaleigh Rogers| Date: Tue, 05 Sep 2017 13:06:20 +0000<\/strong><\/p>\n

Research scientist Janelle Shane trained a neural network to make up fake diseases.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[10643,13328,10378],"tags":[12498,8592,526,12499,13914],"class_list":["post-9080","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-independent","category-motherboard","category-security","tag-deep-learning","tag-diseases","tag-health","tag-neural-networks","tag-scifi"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9080","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9080"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9080\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9080"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9080"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.palada.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9080"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}