Google's translate AI was doing something terribly wrong - and hilarious

Compared to other techniques in machine learning, generalising is where neural networks and artificial intelligences really excel.

However, if proper care is not taken in their training, the results may be surprising or even unsettling. Yesterday, Google was either under attack or provided an example of this to us Finns, as their service Translate just proved to be generalising a little too well when

translating from Finnish to English. A common pastime for the last couple of days has been to type in 'olen' for 'I am' and your or your friends name, written in lower case letters to avoid giving the machine any cue that the line contains an actual name.

It turned out that Translate would find meaning in everything, even if the name contained hardly any resemblance to any meaningful word in modern Finnish. The results varied from funny to disturbing: olen matti virtanen = I'm sick of power

olen juha mäkelä =I'm a soup dripping

olen matti äijänen = I'm a motherfucker

olen juha sipilä (our prime minister) = I'm a broiler

The last one may have been a prank though because there is an option to 'improve the translation'.

My name translated to

olen otto pulkkinen = I'm getting a bumpy

The reason for these failed translations was probably that the AI had never seen such sentences before. Names are always capitalised. Producing nothing as an answer was obviously not an option (I think it used to be in previous versions), so it just had to pick the most likely sentence out of a bunch of badly scoring ones. Such creative solutions are not what is really wanted from a machine translation unless you are into poetry, yet they are very welcome in machine composition of music. Music has no correct or right interpretation. So I encourage every computer musician to experiment with neural networks, no matter how imperfectly trained.