Skip to main content

This A.I. makes up gibberish words and definitions that sound astonishingly real

A sesquipedalian is a person who overuses uncommon words like lameen (a bishop’s letter expressing a fault or reprimand) or salvestate (to transport car seats to the dining room) just for the sake of it. The first of those italicized words is real. The second two aren’t. But they totally should be. They’re the invention of a new website called This Word Does Not Exist. Powered by machine learning, it conjures up entirely new words never before seen or used, and even generates a halfway convincing definition for them. It’s all kinds of brilliant.

Recommended Videos

“In February, I quit my job as an engineering director at Instagram after spending seven intense years building their ranking algorithms like non-chronological feed,” Thomas Dimson, creator of This Word Does Not Exist, told Digital Trends. “A friend and I were trying to brainstorm names for a company we could start together in the A.I. space. After [coming up with] some lame ones, I decided it was more appropriate to let A.I. name a company about A.I.”

Then, as Dimson tells it, a global pandemic happened, and he found himself at home with lots of time on his hands to play around with his name-making algorithm. “Eventually I stumbled upon the Mac dictionary as a potential training set and [started] generating arbitrary words instead of just company names,” he said.

If you’ve ever joked that someone who uses complex words in their daily lives must have swallowed a dictionary, that’s pretty much exactly what This Word Does Not Exist has done. The algorithm was trained from a dictionary file Dimson structured according to different parts of speech, definition, and example usage. The model refines OpenAI’s controversial GPT-2 text generator, the much-hyped algorithm once called too dangerous to release to the public. Dimson’s twist on it assigns probabilities to potential words based on which letters are likely to follow one another until the “word” looks like a reasonably convincing dictionary entry. As a final step, it checks that the generated word isn’t a real one by looking it up in the original training set.

This Word Does Not Exist is just the latest in a series of “[Insert object] Does Not Exist” creations. Others range from non-existent Airbnb listings to fake people to computer-generated memes which nonetheless capture the oddball humor of real ones.

“People have a nervous curiosity toward what makes us human,” Dimson said. “By looking at these machine-produced demos, we are better able to understand ourselves. I’m reminded of the fascination with Deep Blue beating Kasparov in 1996 or AlphaGo beating Lee Sedol in 2016.”

Luke Dormehl
Former Digital Trends Contributor
I'm a UK-based tech writer covering Cool Tech at Digital Trends. I've also written for Fast Company, Wired, the Guardian…
An Amazon A.I. scientist wants to transform downtown Jackson, Mississippi
Nashlie Sephus

Most people look at a couple of vacant lots and see … vacant lots. But Nashlie Sephus sees gold.

Sephus, a 35-year-old Black A.I. researcher with Amazon, plans to turn seven buildings and about 500,000 square feet of downtown Jackson, Mississippi, into a technology park and incubator. Her story, as detailed on Inc.’s Web site, is remarkable:
The 35-year-old has spent the past four years splitting her time between Jackson, her hometown, and Atlanta, where she works as an applied science manager for Amazon's artificial intelligence initiative. Amazon had acquired Partpic, the visual recognition technology startup where she was chief technology officer, in 2016 for an undisclosed sum. In 2018, she founded the Bean Path, an incubator and technology consulting nonprofit in Jackson that she says has helped more than 400 local businesses and individuals with their tech needs.
But beyond entrepreneurship and deep A.I. know-how, Sephus is eager to bring tech to a city hardly known for its tech roots. "It's clear that people don't expect anything good to come from Jackson," she told Inc. "So it's up to us to build something for our hometown, something for the people coming behind us."

Read more
Clever new A.I. system promises to train your dog while you’re away from home
finding rover facial recognition app dog face big eyes

One of the few good things about lockdown and working from home has been having more time to spend with pets. But when the world returns to normal, people are going to go back to the office, and in some cases that means leaving dogs at home for a large part of the day, hopefully with someone coming into your house to let them out at the midday point.

What if it was possible for an A.I. device, like a next-generation Amazon Echo, to give your pooch a dog-training class while you were away? That’s the basis for a project carried out by researchers at Colorado State University. Initially spotted by Chris Stokel-Walker, author of YouTubers:How YouTube Shook Up TV and Created a New Generation of Stars, and reported by New Scientist, the work involves a prototype device that’s able to give out canine commands, check to see if they’re being obeyed, and then provide a treat as a reward when they are.

Read more
This outrageous massage chair has A.I voice control and blackout-proof power
bodyfriend quantum massage chair bang and olufsen ces 2021

Self-driving cars and 100-inch TVs might capture the headlines, but any tried-and-true CES veteran can tell you that the highlight of every show is the insane massage chairs that show up every year.

The destressing devices are generally more tricked out than anything that ever appeared on Pimp My Ride. And this year, you’d be hard-pressed to find one more loaded than Bodyfriend’s Quantum.

Read more