Small Step For Spam, Giant Leap For AI?

Computers

from the spam-for-hawaiians-only dept

While anti-spam software companies try to claim successes, most people still point to their failures. The problem with spam filters still revolves around the tricky determination of spam versus real email. If the filter is a little too twitchy, you wind up with mysteriously missing emails that you actually wanted to read (false positives). However, to avoid those false positives, you’ll probably let more real spam (false negatives) through, which defeats part of the reason for using a filter. Although it seems like the spam problem isn’t going away, the battle between spammers and automated spam filters could produce advances in artificial intelligence as spam provides a sort of Turing test. So the solution to the spam problem may be just ten years away, because everyone knows AI is always ten years from being self-aware.