AI learns to ditch swear words Tim Coggin / Alamy Stock Photo

F-bombs are out, and pleases and thankyous are in. A system created by IBM translates offensive chatter on social media into more polite language, while keeping the content intact. It could be used to take some of the sting out of online abuse.

To create the system, the team first harvested just under ten million posts from Twitter and Reddit, labelled as either containing offensive language or not.

They then made an artificial intelligence algorithm made up of several parts. One part parsed a given offensive sentence …