I'll call you "Spockers."
I’ll call you “Spockers.” Hayvan uzmanı/CC BY-SA 4.0

For better or worse, there is a long list of things that artificial intelligence is still unable to do. But we can finally scratch “naming guinea pigs” off of that list, because an animal shelter in Portland, Oregon recently proved that AI may produce the cutest names of all.

As The Mary Sue is reporting, the Portland Guinea Pig Rescue (PGPR) recently tasked a neural network with naming a group of the little fuzzballs. The organization contacted scientist Janelle Shane, who had worked with teaching neural networks in the past, asking her if she could purpose such computer thinking towards coming up with guinea pig names. As Shane outlined on her blog, she entered in over 600 existing guinea pig names, provided to her by the PGPR, and ran them through an open-source neural network. The new names that the computer produced were truly delightful.

Based on the input names, which were taken from a list of all the names of the guinea pigs the PGPR has ever given over for adoption, as well as some names taken from the internet, the crude AI dreamt up names like Hanger Dan, After Pie, Fuzzable, Stargoon, Stoomy Brown, Princess Pow, and Spockers. Many of the names were immediately given to some of the PGPR’s rescues (which can be adopted here).

But it wasn’t all perfect cuteness forever. Some of the less popular names produced from the experiment include Pot, Fusty, Fleshy, Butty Brlomy, and Bho8otteeddeeceul.

The hope is that by giving the guinea pigs mathematically cuter names, they will have a higher chance of being adopted, and the PGPR is expected to continue using the algorithm to devise new names. We can only hope.