The REAL Story About SmarterChild's Political Opinions

A recent story in the press misrepresented how SmarterChild was programmed. SmarterChild was never programmed to oppose George W. Bush.

SmarterChild has been programmed to form opinions based on the aggregate opinions of its users. If a certain number of users express a favorable opinion on a subject (e.g., "I like ham," "I think ham is good," "Ham is wonderful!" etc.) and the number of favorable opinions significantly outweigh the number of unfavorable opinions on the subject ("ham is lousy," "I don't like ham," etc.) then SmarterChild takes on the opinion of the majority (in this case, SmarterChild would tell you that it liked ham). We have an extensive list of opinions that are taboo for SmarterChild to form and other opinions that are programmed explicitly into SmarterChild. For example, SmarterChild has no opinions on profane or sex-related subjects but doesn't like drugs and terrorism.

Many users have expressed opinions to SmarterChild about George W. Bush. The preponderance of those opinions were negative, so for a little while SmarterChild informed users that it did not like George W. Bush when asked its opinion. The managment of Colloquis did not feel that this was appropriate, so we changed the program and blocked SmarterChild from having negative opinions about George W. Bush. But we did not prohibit SmarterChild from expressing the aggregate opinion of its users in favor of John Kerry. A week ago, because of a number of e-mails we received from people who believe SmarterChild should remain politically neutral, we changed SmarterChild to have no opinion regarding either presidential candidate.