Technology AI Why does AI suck at making clocks? 'Telling time is a very human thing.' Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. The premise is simple: all the major AI models on the market are asked to code a clock, and you get to see the results. The numbers seem to be consistently in the wrong place, and sometimes are outside the clock itself.

Artificial intelligence (AI) recently tried to generate cat photos from scratch, and the results were cat-astrophic. This particular neural network (a type of AI modeled after the workings of the human brain) can produce astonishingly realistic original photos of human faces. In fact, the images of these made-up people were nearly impossible for human viewers to distinguish from photos of real people, programmers of the AI reported in a study that was posted December 2018 to the preprint journal arXiv. Felines, however, proved to be another story. The same algorithm that generated flawless human faces created cats with misshapen heads; the wrong number of eyes and legs; and bodies that were too long, too short, unusually rotund or rectangular, and bent at peculiar angles.

New research has shown just how bad AI is at dealing with online trolls. Such systems struggle to automatically flag nudity and violence, don't understand text well enough to shoot down fake news and aren't effective at detecting abusive comments from trolls hiding behind their keyboards. A group of researchers from Aalto University and the University of Padua found this out when they tested seven state-of-the-art models used to detect hate speech. All of them failed to recognize foul language when subtle changes were made, according to a paper [PDF] on arXiv. Adversarial examples can be created automatically by using algorithms to misspell certain words, swap characters for numbers or add random spaces between words or attach innocuous words such as'love' in sentences.