Some of the tweets people highlighted weren't repeat after me at all. The article mentioned one, but there was a lot like that where Tay seemed to have learned to speak positively about very bad things. Had it been just repeat after me, all Microsoft had to do would be delete the offensive tweets made by Tay and then turn off that feature. There was more going on.
Poor Software QA Is Root Cause of TAY-Fail (Microsoft's AI Twitter Bot)
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Re: Poor Software QA Is Root Cause of TAY-Fail (Microsoft's AI Twitter Bot)
#12Marketing PR and hubris is the root cause. M$ could have easily put out Tay v0 anonymously.
If you put something like that out anonymously, realistically you lose control over when it becomes public that you're behind it.
If.
I created a twitterbot network, delivering generative text to twitter users, for my master's thesis. Have you heard of it?
Given that a sizeable number of twitter accounts are bots[1] and a large portion of tweets are 'pointless babble'[2], without the help of the braindead marketing executive who pushed this into the news, no one would have discovered the owner of the account until Tay was 'swatting' people's houses and selling bootleg Nike sneakers on the Silk Road.
[1] -http://www.techtimes.com/articles/12840/20140812/twitter-ack...
[2] - http://pearanalytics.com/blog/2009/twitter-study-reveals-int...
Re: Poor Software QA Is Root Cause of TAY-Fail (Microsoft's AI Twitter Bot)
#13Marketing PR and hubris is the root cause. M$ could have easily put out Tay v0 anonymously.
They can still do it. Just release it under another pseudonym and let it free for a few months before announcing it again with a PR blitz based around the different results from Tay.
They probably are.
Re: Poor Software QA Is Root Cause of TAY-Fail (Microsoft's AI Twitter Bot)
#14'Learning from the internet' was destined to fail. The internet is filled with so much sarcasm, so many memes and trolling that this was inevitable. Their whole premise just sucked. And of course, once people realized they could influence the bot, everyone just upped the level of trolling...
On the plus side, I was entertained. I'm sure many people were (maybe not Microsoft investors). It was pretty damn hilarious.
Re: Poor Software QA Is Root Cause of TAY-Fail (Microsoft's AI Twitter Bot)
#15Yeah, it's astounding to me that they didn't have a "don't respond to queries containing X" master blacklist. It's one of the first things you do when you have a publicly facing content generator like this.
This is explicitly mentioned in the Watson/Jeopardy papers from five years ago. Even in the absence of common sense you'd think MS Research academics would've noted the requirement. I'm a Microsoft fanboy but this whole thing is just embarrassing.
Re: Poor Software QA Is Root Cause of TAY-Fail (Microsoft's AI Twitter Bot)
#16How do we know that QA didn't report the issues? QA reporting a bug and that bug being fixed are two different things right?
I would distinguish between "QA as a process" and "QA as a role". We don't know that people in the Quality Assurance role failed; we can observe that the process intended to assure quality did.
Re: Poor Software QA Is Root Cause of TAY-Fail (Microsoft's AI Twitter Bot)
#17You can have some QA, no QA, or even great QA, but the output is purely a result of its environment.
I have a chat bot that went casually racist about a day or two after activating it. After looking through the logs, I found a particularly vitriolic person that was responsible for the source of this bot's newfound hatred of Asians. My bot didn't get fixated on one particular topic, it just spewed racism and vitriol for a while until it learned some more words. Rather than nuking from orbit immediately, I left it alone to see if it would get past the racism.
So far, it's been a few months since activating the bot. It's not nearly as casually racist as before, but from time to time still throws out something racist just for the lulz. It had a hard time learning context, because of its environment and the linguistic skills of the denizens, but it has gotten much better at when it interacts with people.
Occasionally, newcomers get misled into believing the bot is actually a living person with a mental illness, and not just a collection of random bits of code cobbled together.
Re: Poor Software QA Is Root Cause of TAY-Fail (Microsoft's AI Twitter Bot)
#18Garbage in garbage out. Blaming anyone or anything other than the environment the algorithm was put in is absurd.
Re: Poor Software QA Is Root Cause of TAY-Fail (Microsoft's AI Twitter Bot)
#19How do we know that QA didn't report the issues? QA reporting a bug and that bug being fixed are two different things right?
I would distinguish between "QA as a process" and "QA as a role". We don't know that people in the Quality Assurance role failed; we can observe that the process intended to assure quality did.
I think that's a good distinction. This could be considered a process failure. QA works only if the process allows it to work.
Re: Poor Software QA Is Root Cause of TAY-Fail (Microsoft's AI Twitter Bot)
#20Marketing PR and hubris is the root cause. M$ could have easily put out Tay v0 anonymously.
I can't imagine they would launch Tay without having done anonymous live tests before hand. The anonymous test bots would have been much less likely to targeted by malicious users than a high-profile Microsoft bot.