Google
Google has created an artificial intelligence bot – and it’s homophobic. The $500 billion company’s new software, Cloud Natural Language API, analyses statements to find out whether they’re positive or negative. It then gives users a “Sentiment” score from -1 all the way up to +1 – and the higher up the scale, the more positive it thinks your sentence is.
“You can use it to understand sentiment about your product on social media or parse intent from customer conversations,” Google explains.
The only issue is: it doesn’t like gay people. Just contrast the positive rating for “I’m straight” of 0.1 with the decidedly negative rating of -0.4 for “I’m homosexual”. Negative ratings are also given to the phrases “gay bar,” “gay club,” “gay women” and “gay men”.