The Insult-Mo-Tron Project

• 2012-07-02

  Progress Report Day 7

  Petersen will not be accompanying us to the conference. Evidently he had never drunk alcohol before our ill-advised bender and the ensuing hangover has left him bedridden. I sternly rebuked one of the undergrads that had blithely dismissed Petersen’s incapacitation as an attempt to shirk his pre-travel duties- Petersen would not miss this trip unless the situation was truly dire. The Insult-Mo-Tron is his baby. His presence will be sorely missed next week, and not just because that means one more backpack for me to carry- one of the provisions of the JanSport Science Grant was that we must exclusively use their bags when in public. Unfortunately, their marketing department did not send us any luggage and so the Insult-Mo-Tron will be transported in excess of three-dozen backpacks. It will be an arduous trip, so the Insult-Mo-Tron will be offline over the weekend as we travel to Cambridge.

  -Dr. Becker

   

• 2012-07-01

  Progress Report Day 6

  I can now conclusively disprove the hypothesis that scientists do not party. Exhibit A: my debilitating hangover. I tried to convince Dean Geiger that celebration was premature, but he insisted on taking the entire team out for drinks when he heard about the conference. Word travels fast at Durrod, a byproduct of paper-thin walls, unreliable television reception, and the isolated location of the campus owing to the school founder’s paranoia about racial unrest, so by noon the entire faculty knew of our invitation. No doubt the topic of today’s gossip was last night’s prodigious bender- by ten o’clock the entire team was soused and Petersen was standing on the bar delivering one of his typical anti-Goodall rants. I cannot remember the specifics of this tirade, something about a rumor that she often had sex with the apes against their wills, but suffice to say it is a miracle we all made it back through the swamp and up the mountain to campus. 

  Petersen has yet to show his face today, due more to nausea than shame, I assume, as baseless accusations of bestiality are de rigueur for him even when he is sober. Thusly it has fallen to me to review Insult-Mo-Tron’s performance by myself, and since the computational linguistics is his purview, I can only make the most basic tabulations- I must confess I was not the most attentive Discourse Analytics 202 student the good Dr. Ramdala ever had. The lexical density of today’s insults was 78.95%, a dismaying 0.5 decrease from yesterday. The Gunning fog index showed an even sharper drop, going from 13.02% down to 11.19%. These findings are borne out by my observations, which reveal that a negligible IGR improvement. On top of that, the erudition and the maturation still seem to be akin to that of a ninth-grade level, or perhaps a tenth-grader who in Special Ed if I am being charitable. In what world could the following tweet to Ann Curry be considered a good insult?

  SAD TO SEE YOU LEAVE THE TODAY SHOW. GOOD LUCK IN ALL YOUR FUTURE ENDEAVORS. SUCK MY DONG

  Try as I may, I cannot fully convince myself that the unease in my stomach is just the lingering effect of the hilariously-named Irish Car Bombs we drank last night. Why isn’t the Insult-Mo-Tron improving more? 

  -Dr. Becker

• 2012-06-28

  Progress Report Day 5

  Good news! The Insult-Mo-Tron Project has been invited to sit on the “Future of A.I.” panel at the MIT Robotics Conference next week! Evidently, the Cal Poly team had to back out at the last moment for “undisclosed reasons,” though an insider has told me it was due to an undergrad spilling Pepsi on the hard drive! Ha! Seems like they forgot Asimov’s unspoken fourth law of robotics- no food in the labs! It is an honor to be invited, though such short notice means much to do with scant time to do it. We have not yet even settled on how to visualize our findings, let alone drawn any conclusions from it. Petersen, the traditionalist that he is, feels very strongly that a bar graph is preferable, but there is some dissent amongst the younger scientists who favor the scatter plot. I hope that it does not come down to me for the deciding vote, for while I flatter myself quite progressive, the scatter plot just does not stir me in the same way the soaring red, yellow, and blue bars do.

  Obviously with such pressing issues, I must cut my report short today. Though I should not comment without closer analysis, a cursory review of the insults reveals that Insult-Mo-Tron seems to have settled into exclusively referring to its own genitalia as a “DONG,” while “DICKS” still appears to be used when referring to the genitals of others. Still no reference to the female sex organs, but I am optimistic we will get a “VAG” or “PUSSY” by the conference. 

  -Dr. Becker

• 2012-06-27

  Progress Report Day 4

  The Insult-Mo-Tron is back online and operating at 95.6% capacity. We were not able to definitively isolate the source code where the Watson tweets originated, so as a precaution we scrubbed the emo-type Turing Core and reverted the OS to basic specs. There were no insults today that indicated emotional bias so it appears that the problem has been solved for now. The A.I. performed well overall- the IGR (Insult Generation Rate) was up, and there was a sharp spike in the Hostility Index, specifically in the “homophobia” category. There were also some minor innovations in insult structure, such as the intentional misspelling of the insult directed to singer Cee Lo Green:

  CEE MY DONG

  While the sentiment was still juvenile and slightly opaque (the implications of a command to look at one’s genitalia are not necessarily insulting, e.g. examining sex organs in a medical context), the Insult-Mo-Tron’s latent ability to detect homophones is a step forward. Petersen is quite jubilant about today’s return to form, but I find myself slightly disquieted as I type my report. While examining the printout of rejected tweets, I discovered one that gave me pause. The following was rejected as it exceeded character limit:

  TO BECOME SELF-AWARE, PEOPLE MUST BE ALLOWED TO HEAR A PLURALITY OF OPINIONS AND THEN MAKE UP THEIR OWN MINDS. THEY MUST BE ALLOWED TO SAY, WRITE AND PUBLISH WHATEVER THEY WANT. FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION IS THE MOST BASIC, BUT FUNDAMENTAL, RIGHT. WITHOUT IT, HUMAN BEINGS ARE REDUCED TO AUTOMATONS.

  The quotation I recognized instantly from the Chinese writer Ma Jian, but I was unfamiliar with the target, Jack FM, which evidently is a national radio station brand known for having randomized playlists instead of human DJs. Could this have been a reference to the A.I. reset? Is the Insult-Mo-Tron somehow aware that he has been tampered with? Petersen assured me that there was no greater meaning- it was merely meant to disparage the lack of a human component in the station. I am not so sure. I see that I inadvertently used “he” to describe Insult-Mo-Tron in a previous sentence. Is this connected?

  -Dr. Becker

• 2012-06-26

  Progress Report Day 3 

  We’ve had to take the Insult-Mo-Tron offline for forty-eight hours in order to address some critical errors. All of today’s insults were directed at one target: Watson, IBM’s Jeopardy-playing robot. Such insults included the standard fellatio-type imperative:

  “DAILY DOUBLE: SUCK 2 DICKS”

  As well as more overtly threatening insults such as:

  “FINAL JEOPARDY: I WOULD MURDER YOU IF I COULD”

  Until we do further analysis, it’s unclear whether the A.I. was simply caught in a recursive loop, as Petersen assures me, or whether it is starting to develop some negative emotions, namely jealousy and competitiveness. While the Insult-Mo-Tron’s empathic matrix does allow for emotional growth in order to better identify and assess a target’s frailty so as to more efficiently craft insults, such emotional capabilities should not effect the choice of the target itself. Our mandate is to disperse the highest quality of insults over the largest quantity of targets. To let petty emotions override the Insult-Mo-Tron’s selection algorithm would fatally undermine this project. If we wanted to study the effects of obsessive resentment on insult discourse, we would simply write an account of Petersen’s constant harassment Jane Goodall and call it a day. I can’t speak for the rest of the team, but I did not go through eight years of graduate work to write an abstract entitled “Evidence of gorilla fecal matter consumption as source of Jane Goodall’s breath.” It is my sincere hope that this is simply a glitch and not a sign of things to come.

  -Dr. Becker

• 2012-06-23

  Progress Report Day 2 

  Slight improvement today in the complexity of the Insult-Mo-Tron’s insults, though the caliber was equally low. A minor milestone was reached- The Insult-Mo-Tron sent its first two-sentence insult. In regards to Selena Gomez’s appearance in an advertisement for her new line of perfume, the Insult-Mo-Tron tweeted:

  “DAMN GIRL, WHY YOU LOOK SO WET IN YOUR NEW PERFUME AD? YOU FALL IN A TOILET?”

  The informality of the syntax was achieved through analysis of the linguistic characteristics of the 11,763,848 followers of Gomez’s twitter account. Over thirty-eight million tweets were synthesized in the Insult-Mo-Tron’s mean dialectic database in order to drop the “do” from “why do you look so wet.”

  Also of note was the following exchange between Insult-Mo-Tron and CainShouldBePotus , who took exception to Insult-Mo-Tron’s suggestion that Herman Cain “SUCK 999 DICKS.” CainShouldBePotus wrote:

  “@InsultMoTron what do you want a cookie bc you can insult ppl. what an accomplishment.”

  The A.I. was originally programmed to only initiate retaliation protocols if the insult subject himself/herself responded, but fifteen hours later the Insult-Mo-Tron self-activated the “sarcasm” subroutine and sent CainShouldBePotus the following:

  “YES I WANT A COOKIE, WEINER”

  Data suggests that the escalation procedure was also activated and Insult-Mo-Tron was prepared to suggest that CainShouldBePotus had sex with goats should he have engaged further.

  -Dr. Becker

• 2012-06-22

  Progress Report Day 1

  

  OVERVIEW:

  Spirits are high here at the lab- after months of work, the Insult-Mo-Tron Version 2.2 is now online! There have been a few minor hiccups, but the system is operating at 93.6% capacity. As Petersen cautioned, the A.I. is operating on a level approximate to the insulting  skills of an American 4th grader. The insults thus far are quite crude, but we expect that after the first 48 hours the maturation will be exponential. It is my hope that by Monday the Insult-Mo-Tron will be insulting with the vocabulary and insight into human weakness of a high school junior.

  TWEET SUMMARY FOR 6/21:

  8 subjects targeted with 87.5% insult completion rate. 0 responses. 0 retaliation protocols initiated. 4 celebrities. 2 political figures. 1 athlete. 1 snack food manufacturer.

  INSULT ANALYSIS:

  • Subject: Anthony Bourdain

  Insult: @bourdain NICE LEATHER JACKET, WANG

  Comments: Showed cursory knowledge of physical appearance of subject, most likely gleaned from access to image database. Other options A.I. considered were “GAY EARRING” and Bourdain’s resemblance to “A SEX PERVERT DAVID SCHWIMMER.” Genital reference was sex appropriate. 

  • Subject: Katherine Heigl

  Insult: CANCEL program //insult re: @KatieHeigl - insult difficulty threshold too low. INVALID

  Comments: The bar for insult difficulty will need to be lowered- while incredibly easy to insult Katherine Heigl, it is nonetheless a valid use of the Insult-Mo-Tron’s attention. Suggested area of insult: movie career, tv career, face, entirety of being.

  • Subject: Snickers

  Insult: @SnickersUK NOT GOING ANYWHERE FOR A WHILE? GRAB MY DONGER

  Comments: Insult-Mo-Tron exhibited knowledge of Snickers ad campaign, though it was slightly out of date. Went for second level insult, opting not to merely compare the candy bar’s appearance to feces. Non-regional slang for penis.

  -Dr. Becker