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Learning from Tay’s introduction

blogs.microsoft.com

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Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#111

Post by EC1 »

warmblood wrote: post #89
mindslight wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of her tweets were pretty inflammatory What, were people forced to print the tweets out on sandpaper and wipe their asses with them? It's pretty fucked up that thought policing has gotten so entrenched into our psyche that it's "obvious" an experiment should be discontinued, apologized for, and be pondered as a priori irresponsible , all because it generated vulgar phrases! Corporations have always been vulner…

Standing behind the open and casual use of racial slurs isn't advocacy of freedom of speech. It's advocacy of a specific kind of hate speech that is only used when someone intends to vilify and direct hostility towards a marginalized minority.

You are already part of the collective and there is no going back. I feel bad for you.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#112

Post by tacos »

chiph wrote: post #40
tacos wrote: post #27

Microsoft seems perpetually five to seven years behind the culture. You can see it in their ads, their product names, their outreach. Ironically it can actually be quite lucrative. I remember talking to people in the music group about MySpace (I was not an employee). They looked at me funny. Ten minutes later someone finally said "You keep pronouncing the product wrong. It's called MSN Spaces." The people working on…

The MySpace sale was in 2005. That's 10 years ago - a virtual eternity.

That's my point. Ten years ago 75 people in Red West were so heads down putting together a MySpace competitor and an online service to promote musicians that they didn't have time even to try the competing site they were knocking off, poorly.

Five years ago Microsoft launched a variety of awful code forge sites that couldn't be more tone deaf to what was going on with code sharing online.

Now we have forty people who are so heads-down on an AI chat-bot that apparently they have no idea how Twitter works. But hey, sure sounds neat, let 'er rip!

Have these people really not had a chance to use Twitter recently? Are they completely oblivious to the tone shift there particularly during the past six months, even more so now during the US political elections?

This was an obvious recipe for disaster that any 22 year old working at Starbucks could have predicted.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#113

Post by MawNicker »

magicalist wrote: post #101
mindslight wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of her tweets were pretty inflammatory What, were people forced to print the tweets out on sandpaper and wipe their asses with them? It's pretty fucked up that thought policing has gotten so entrenched into our psyche that it's "obvious" an experiment should be discontinued, apologized for, and be pondered as a priori irresponsible , all because it generated vulgar phrases! Corporations have always been vulner…

> It's pretty fucked up that thought policing has gotten so entrenched into our psyche that it's "obvious" an experiment should be discontinued, apologized for, and be pondered as a priori irresponsible, all because it generated vulgar phrases! This is fucking stupid. It was a bot that didn't do what they wanted it to do in a publicly embarrassing way. They could also be legitimately sorry that something they created…

It's sad that it's ironic. It's always ironic. Tolerance is the intolerance of intolerance. It's true. Intolerance is shitty and I fucking hate it. I want it to die. I complain about it's enduring existence whenever I get the opportunity. I know I'm being ironic. Do you know there's no other option?

I actually appreciated knowing that someone else saw the same condemnation. Microsoft is a world authority. That it just apologized for these things in the same motion makes them offensive. The reality was rather mundane. They didn't do anything wrong. They got pranked. This should be something we laugh about. It's only upsetting for the 5 seconds it takes you to realize: no one intended this. That should have been Microsoft's response imho.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#114

Post by dr_zoidberg »

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #109

> The great experience with XiaoIce led us to wonder: Would an AI like this be just as captivating in a radically different cultural environment? Tay – a chatbot created for 18- to 24- year-olds in the U.S. for entertainment purposes – is our first attempt to answer this question. Maybe you did answer that question. No, the answer is not that 18-24 year olds in the US are racist and what not. But that the ones respon…

A coworker mentioned, a couple[0] (1-2) years ago, that in some european country they were starting to use a machine-learning-driven system to predict zones where more police was needed to better respond to crime. It wasn't Minority Report style, just a broad statistic, but it was quite interesting. Unfortunately, I've forgotten the country and the name, so I can't be any more specific.

[0] https://xkcd.com/1070/ -- can't say "a couple" without refering to this strip, obviously.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#115

Post by resu_nimda »

Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack.

Well that's total BS. Releasing a thing like this on the open internet without a simple "don't say Hitler" rule? It had a feature where it would repeat anything you say. Abusing that doesn't require a sophisticated coordinated attack, as they imply. What kinds of abuse did they prepare for, then?

This is a colossal failure to demonstrate a basic understanding of how (some) people act on the internet. I just don't know how they expected anything other than this exact outcome.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#116

Post by popmystack »

mindslight wrote: post #72
flatline wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> Many of her tweets were pretty inflammatory What, were people forced to print the tweets out on sandpaper and wipe their asses with them? It's pretty fucked up that thought policing has gotten so entrenched into our psyche that it's "obvious" an experiment should be discontinued, apologized for, and be pondered as a priori irresponsible , all because it generated vulgar phrases! Corporations have always been vulner…

None of this is remotely related to thought policing.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#118

Post by Torgo »

warmblood wrote: post #89
mindslight wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Many of her tweets were pretty inflammatory What, were people forced to print the tweets out on sandpaper and wipe their asses with them? It's pretty fucked up that thought policing has gotten so entrenched into our psyche that it's "obvious" an experiment should be discontinued, apologized for, and be pondered as a priori irresponsible , all because it generated vulgar phrases! Corporations have always been vulner…

Standing behind the open and casual use of racial slurs isn't advocacy of freedom of speech. It's advocacy of a specific kind of hate speech that is only used when someone intends to vilify and direct hostility towards a marginalized minority.

Your definition of free speech is alien to the legal history of this country.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#119

Post by taf2 »

resu_nimda wrote: post #115

Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack. Well that's total BS. Releasing a thing like this on the open internet without a simple "don't say Hitler" rule? It had a feature where it would repeat anything you…

I'm by no means someone who would normally defend Microsoft but for real we are all learning. Failure is a successful outcome of research. Discovering vulnerablities is a valuable outcome.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#120

Post by joe_the_user »

resu_nimda wrote: post #115

Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack. Well that's total BS. Releasing a thing like this on the open internet without a simple "don't say Hitler" rule? It had a feature where it would repeat anything you…

Well,

Claims that MS did due diligence aside, Tay having a vulnerability that some people exploited is still better explanation than "it was a real AI that learned poor morals from the Internet".

Also, the claim was that there were small groups that input a lot of data to the bot quickly - the script might have been "don't say X unless everyone is saying X already", which might have worked in small tests but clearly could be exploited.

I suspect most talking as if "she" was like a teen soaking up random bad ideas are falling for the Eliza Effect.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA_effect

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