What is white and red and stupid all over? YouTube! Or at least that is that is the premise that the StupidFilter project is using to seed their self-training database. And really is there any form of stupidity with a more enduring appeal than a video discussion? Of course not!The goal simple: build a stupid filter that works like a spam filter. Take a huge collection of stupid comments (225,000 to start), rate and organize them according to stupidness, and then teach the filter to recognize stupidity in the wild. Once the research is done a core engine will be released suitable for implementation in blogs, wikis, social networks, content management systems, and video sharing websites.
The current target release date for an alpha release is December 2007. After that the race begins: can the StupidFilter keep up with the diabolical adaptiveness of internet stupidity? Or will "stupiders" change their tactics and find ways around the filtering technology (by using complete words, for example)? Only time, and the efforts of a few brave programmers, will tell.
1. My Firefox extension called YouTube Comment Snob achieves something like this by filtering YouTube comments based on spelling quality, capitalization, and punctuation usage: http://www.chrisfinke.com/addons/youtube-comment-snob/
Posted at 5:23PM on Oct 10th 2007 by Christopher Finke