Learning from Tay’s introduction

If you're not asking yourself "what could a small but well-coordinated group of bad actors accomplish with our online tool" you're just being negligent.

This 'but we did it in China' rationalization is so flimsy. What happened with Tay was easily predictable given the nature of Twitter.

This reads like science fiction:

Learning from Somebot's introduction.

Last week we deployed Somebot to $location. Our confidence in Somebot was high because we had thought about all likely scenarios in our comfortable offices. We are deeply sorry and assume the full responsibility from Somebot's actions. Moving forward we will make sure to include safeguards to reduce the amount of pain caused by Somebot's deployment.

Our deepest condolences to the families of the affected and to the survivors. Megacorp cares about your well being. To help cover expenses from the tragedy we will deposit $money in your Megacorp account.

God bless the federated nations of Megacorp.

The specific one they're describing is, I think, a feature that would have Tay echo anything you sent it. That one was somewhat more "annoying embarrassment" than "coordinated attack." The bigger problem was that Tay began spontaneously tweeting ugly statements, a problem that can be summed up as "When Twitter is your learning corpus, you are at risk of your learning corpus being made up of tweets."

https://www.reddit.com/r/tay_tweets has lots of examples, most of them 4chan-level.

These few are completely different and certainly interesting: https://i.imgur.com/iVof3D4.jpg https://i.imgur.com/YwlfwyL.png https://i.imgur.com/IlpFUiZ.png (though it's hard to confirm they're legit, as Retr0spectrum points out).

I think the vulnerability was msft underestimating the extent of effort 4chan users would put into trolling Tay.

By the end of the day, Tay could 4chan with the worst of them.