A couple years ago, I discovered an awesome project MIT was doing. It’s called Open Mind Commonsense. It consists of this huge database and they rely on user input to “teach” it things. It has all different types of activities you can do to help enter information. Stuff like entering in facts about the world. Or you can give examples to describe a verb. Somehow it combines all the things people enter, and it uses those to form relationships between words and their meanings and usage. It’s really interesting, and especially fun once you get on a roll.

My favorite thing to do with it, though, is to enter in “gritty real-life” type of information. I feel like most people using this are being pretty unimaginative. But if we’re trying to develop an intelligent computer system, we’re gonna have to give it all kinds of information. We can’t just whitewash everything, or else it will never be as creative and intelligent as it could be. I mean, computers aren’t gonna teach THEMSELVES about hookers and ninjas…

With that in mind, I’d like to share some of the things I taught it tonight. They have a section where they show you a photo, and then you enter in a sentence or two describing it. Here are some of the photos I was given, along with my descriptions.

“i removed my spectacles so that i could adminster a more thorough beating.”

“bill clinton knew the value of patronizing retards”

“i handed her the disk, hoping she would find there the nude photos i “accidentally” put of myself”

“i had to hide my getaway car because the back seat was filled with that hooker’s blood”

“Even though everyone was singing “Happy Birthday,” I still heard the bitch laughing at me”

“jesse was dead, and we were glad. he was always an asshole”

Like I always say, there’s nothing better than helping out a good cause. Try it for yourself. Go on, help a computer!