A mathematician has created an entirely new curse word based on a list of 186 offensive terms - and she said it is'the world's ultimate swear word. Sophie Maclean, a student at Kings College London, found'banger' is the supreme offensive term or'ber' for short. The researcher fed a list of popular'bad words' to a computer model, which then found the supreme word begins with the letter'b,' has four letters and ends in '-er.' Mclean found that when no inputs were given, the model made up words like'ditwat.' Most people have their favorite curse word, but a mathematician used their coding skills to create a new one deemed the world's ultimate swear word Maclean told BBC Science Focus: 'I think neither is as satisfying as a'f*ck' when you've stubbed your toe, or a'sh*t' when you realize you've forgotten your parent's birthday. But both feel like they could be quite good insults for people.'

According to a 2016 report, 47% of internet users have experienced online harassment or abuse [1], and 27% of all American internet users self-censor what they say online because they are afraid of being harassed. On a similar note, a survey by The Wikimedia Foundation (the organization behind Wikipedia) showed that 38% of the editors had encountered harassment, and over half them said this lowered their motivation to contribute in the future [2]; a 2018 study found 81% of American respondents wanted companies to address this problem [3]. If we want safe and productive online platforms where users do not chase each other away, something needs to be done. One solution to this problem might be to use human moderators that read everything and take action if somebody crosses a boundary, but this is not always feasible (nor safe for the mental health of the moderators); popular online games can have the equivalent population of a large city playing at any one time, with hundreds of thousands of conversations taking place simultaneously. And much like a city, these players can be very diverse.

Comedian George Carlin had a list of Seven Words You Can't Say on TV. Parts of the internet have a list of 402 banned words, plus one emoji, . Slack uses the open source List of Dirty, Naughty, Obscene, and Otherwise Bad Words, found on GitHub, to help groom its search suggestions. Open source mapping project OpenStreetMap uses it to sanitize map edits. Google artificial intelligence researchers recently removed web pages containing any of the words from a dataset used to train a powerful new system for making sense of language.

Today, Microsoft announced that it's rolling out filters that will let Xbox Live players automatically limit the text-based messages they receive to four maturity tiers: "Friendly, Medium, Mature, and Unfiltered." What's more interesting is a "looking ahead" promise Microsoft made at the end of the announcement (emphasis added): Ultimately our vision is to supplement our existing efforts and leverage our company efforts in AI and machine learning technology to provide filtration across all types of content on Xbox Live, delivering control to each and every individual player. Your feedback is more important than ever as we continue to evolve this experience and make Xbox a safe, welcome and inclusive place to game. The ultimate goal, Xbox Live program manager Rob Smith told The Verge, is a system "similar to what you'd expect on broadcast TV where people are having a conversation, and in real time, we're able to detect a bad phrase and beep it out for users who don't want to see that." While broadcast networks still use live engineers to censor their tape-delayed content (with sometimes disastrous errors), Microsoft's plans involve using machine learning to filter voice communication on a much larger scale without centralized human intervention.

Facial recognition software that struggles to see black faces. A risk assessment algorithm with embedded racial biases. While artificial intelligence promises efficiency, and will likely determine which company wins market leadership, the technology also has an ugly side. Human hands can transfer prejudice onto the algorithms they create. But AI products don't become bias-infused at random, analysts and executives say.

On Saturday, iPhone users around the world began testing and confirming what is arguably Siri's most bizarre response to a question yet. Before grabbing your own phone to test this out, however, be mindful of anybody else around. The randy robo-response was apparently first reported on Reddit's Apple community, where a user by the name "thatwasabaddecision" suggested that people ask Siri to "define the word mother," wait for the assistant to ask for an additional definition, and say "yes." What the Reddit user didn't point out, which readers learned by doing the test themselves, was that the second definition Siri offers is succinct and seemingly inaccurate. "As a noun," the computer-generated voice says as of press time, "it means, short for'motherfucker.'"