A Google computer recently made headlines for appearing to become agitated and verbally lashing out at the human working with it.

Artificial intelligence and machine learning researchers say have no fear. That’s not what the computer is doing.

“They’re using big data for machine learning,” said Alan W Black, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Language Technologies Institute. “They’re probably mining logs of questions from various sites, like Google Groups and mailing lists, and you might have noticed that a lot of people on the net are snarky. Because it’s in the training data and the machine doesn’t know if it’s snarky or not, the machine will just use it. You get that personality coming out in the answers.”

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