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Learning from Tay’s introduction

blogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#51

Post by sehugg »

rewrew wrote: post #24
dmcginty wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The bot learned from interacting with users. A bunch of people took to bombarding Tay with racist/sexist/antisemitic remarks which worked their way into its vocabulary. I'm not sure if you could really call it a vulnerability as this is pretty much what the bot was designed to do. It's more of a flaw in the inability to properly filter the content that works its way into the AI.

Yeah, I think them calling it a "vulnerability" makes the entire post seem disingenuous.

I can understand them wanting to call it a "hack" for CYA purposes, but it's a cowardly position. Should we invoke the CFAA every time a company is embarrassed?

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#52

Post by comex »

What an enormous number of news reports have been written containing "Microsoft" and "AI" in the same sentence, all because a glorified SmarterChild had an entirely predictable vulnerability.

If I were paranoid I'd say Microsoft wanted this to happen.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#53

Post by devy »

Unsurprisingly, there had been initial setbacks when XiaoIce was first released in May 2014 on WeChat platform, where users were abusing/attacking "her", causing XiaoIce being pulled by Tencent after being online only for a few days. [1]

Since WeChat is a closed social network, it wasn't too clear what type of "attack/abuse" were conducted. However, almost 2 years later, Microsoft still didn't quite get it about proper censorship in Tay's big turning test[2] in a public social network.

[1] http://tech.ifeng.com/mi/detail_2014_06/01/36613379_0.shtml (in Chinese, use Google Translate)

[2] http://mashable.com/2016/02/05/microsoft-xiaoice-turing-test...

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#54

Post by rmellow »

Morals are learned by social contact, and Tay did this very well. Sure, what our parents taught most of us makes its behaviour reprehensible in comparison. But Tay was, so to speak, 'raised' by people demonstrating vile ideas and this must be taken into account. Would you expect any less from a tortured animal?

Many use this as an example of the dangers of developing AI. Sure it's dangerous, but so are dogs raised for fighting. I don't see anyone arguing against dog breeding for that matter.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#55

Post by Terribledactyl »

> We take full responsibility for not seeing this possibility ahead of time.

Not responsibility for the bot's actions, but responsibility for us not predicting what it would do. Subtle, but sets the tone for we're not responsible for our AI, it just did it.

But isn't part of the point of the AI to do things difficult to predict?

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#59

Post by cb18 »

flatline wrote: post #29
webkike wrote: post #8

This reads like an apologee... But what is there to apologize for? They said that Tay was meant for entertainment, and I doubt that any wholesome varient would be a tenth of the hilarity of a neo-nazi sex crazed chat bot.

Many of her tweets were pretty inflammatory, this response seems appropriate - not overdone, and concise, which is sometimes a stretch for large corporations like Microsoft. I agree that the bot was highly entertaining and met this criteria exceedingly well, but not for the reasons its creator intended. I do suspect there are some interesting AI applications actually going on behind the scenes, and would still be int…

This is an interesting story, because I imagine most people didn't even hear of it until after the thing had come and gone, and the thing sent something like xx,xxx tweets. And some of the tweets seem almost impossibly clever, well at least the Ted Cruz Zodiac killer one, that seemed to show a kind of multi-layered humor generation capability, unless it was just re-purposing some memes I'm unfamiliar with or something.

One thing I think many people are missing about the most 'inflammatory' tweets is that they are all pretty much the result of people giving it a command like, hey tay, repeat this [insert inflammatory remark.] This is indicated with the inflammatory tweets starting with an @ reply.

I almost thought maybe some of this 'oversight' was subversively intentional by someone at MS to start some thinking about where does culpability lie with the actions of an 'autonomous' computer program.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#60

Post by PeCaN »

placeybordeaux wrote: post #23

This leads me to wonder if there is less effort put into trolling on the Chinese Internet. Does anyone with experience in both internets (weebo & twitter for instance) have anything to share? Also does anyone know of some good English language digests of what is happening on the Chinese Internet? I was really interested by brother orange when that happened, and only knew kind of late.

Chinese internet is as bad as the English one (plus a few funny expressions to avoid censorship—frequent use of certain puns for restricted subjects for example). My Chinese internet experience is largely relegated to the Chinese Dota community though, and Dota players in general tend to have a higher percentage of trolls. So my sample is probably biased.
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