8 MEWSFEED Updates & Upgrades WHO RUNS THE WEB? CATS!
The Morris Animal Refuge, based in Philadelphia, US, announced to Twitter on 3 June that it is using AI to name its feline occupants in need of a forever home. Janelle Shane, the brains behind the neural network, was initially approached by the AFK Cat Rescue in Florida in 2018, because it had kittens in need of names and homes. Shane wrote on her blog a year ago: “June is kitten season here in the USA, so shelters are inundated with new kittens right now, and AFK takes the very high- risk cases, kittens who are too small to survive in regular shelters, or who are sick or injured, or have neurological disorders.” Shane tasked an RNN with 8000 real world cat names, but it had no knowledge of the English language or context for the words and letter combinations it would create. It generated names ranging from the nonsensical to the highly unfortunate. Retchion, Hurler and Trickles were just some of its suggestions. Shane decided to revisit the cat-naming problem again this June kitten season for the Morris Animal Refuge, this time using a more complex software. GPT- 2, trained by OpenAI, has a contextual understanding and knows which words and letter combinations tend to be used together in the English language.
It has also figured out which words and letter combinations to avoid, for the most part – although it did suggest naming a cat Kill All Humans. The new AI returned a few thousand names for the Morris Animal
Refuge, and the results? Mostly adorable. Honourable mentions go to Romeo of Darkness, Thelonious Monsieur and of course to the photographed kitty above, Tom Glitter.
Veteran journalist and representative of Pakistan’s ruling Tehreek-e-Insaf party, Shaukat Yousafzai, found himself in an unlikely new role at a press conference in Peshawar. Yousafzai was giving a brief to reporters when a member of his social media team inadvertently switched on the cat filter. The event was livestreamed on Facebook. IMPURRFECT SPEAKER
FEED HAS MOVED HANDLES
Party followers watching online immediately took to the video’s comments section to make jokes at the expense of the Pakistani government, offering up a series of feline puns. All necessary actions to prevent further cat incidents have been taken. The party put out an official statement blaming “human error” and the culprit, it said, was a “hard-working volunteer”. The video has since been deleted, but the party says it felt proud to have brought Pakistani politics to the internet.
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It was several minutes before organisers realised that he had acquired big pink ears, rosy cheeks and whiskers. When one of his colleagues began to speak, he too was transformed into a cat.
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