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Learning from Tay’s introduction

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Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#151

Post by fallenshell »

intopieces wrote: post #135
Houshalter wrote: post #121

Microsoft please don't worry about this. No one but idiots are offended by this. It's understood that its just a stupid chatbot mimicking human responses. The AI isn't terrible, people are. And unless you keep a dataset of every offensive thing a person can say, and every offensive image they can tweet, there's no way to prevent people from tweeting it pictures of Hitler... or Scunthorpe. But who cares. This is just…

>No one but idiots are offended by this. Well, if those "idiots" include potential investors or customers of future MSFT AI products, "don't worry about it" is not sound advice. This is a very public failure of a promising Microsoft product.

Tay is someone's side project.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#152

Post by pervycreeper »

bliti wrote: post #13

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 deploymen…

The response that Microsoft gave was really the worst of both worlds, combining the systematic corporate shirking of responsibility which enables and gives cover to a great deal of evil, with a complete accedence to and embracing of political correctness. Furthermore, their claim that they did not anticipate "this specific attack" is either a lie, or their creators made an extremely obvious mistake (yes, easy to say in hindsight, but it's really hard to believe that this possibility would not occur to competent implementers).

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#153

Post by gaze »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #149
gaze wrote: post #34

It's strange to me that they claim to have implemented some filtering but somehow Tay was saying all sorts of things about Hitler. How do you not anticipate this? I'd imagine the most rudimentary filtering would block Tay from talking about Hitler.

You'd have to include a lot of rudimentary filtering to eliminate every possible incredibly offensive topic. It's entertaining that the hack attempt created a more convincing personality - an out of control teen troll - than the original programming. So maybe Tay really does have a dark and twisted teenage soul. Who knows?

Yeah but if you're gonna dream up a list of like 20 offensive things... Hitler has a good chance of being on it

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#154

Post by Dylan16807 »

intopieces wrote: post #135
Houshalter wrote: post #121

Microsoft please don't worry about this. No one but idiots are offended by this. It's understood that its just a stupid chatbot mimicking human responses. The AI isn't terrible, people are. And unless you keep a dataset of every offensive thing a person can say, and every offensive image they can tweet, there's no way to prevent people from tweeting it pictures of Hitler... or Scunthorpe. But who cares. This is just…

>No one but idiots are offended by this. Well, if those "idiots" include potential investors or customers of future MSFT AI products, "don't worry about it" is not sound advice. This is a very public failure of a promising Microsoft product.

Is anyone offended? The most negative opinion I saw was roughly an exasperated sigh.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#155

Post by jasonwatkinspdx »

mindslight wrote: post #125
magicalist wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> They could also be legitimately sorry that something they created said some racist shit Just to be clear, it's not merely the corporate statement. It's a lot of the comments here, and not what they say directly but the assumptions they make. A thousand little nothings that make up culture - this concept is also part of the argument against casual use of slurs, right? What I'm calling out is the subtle yet pervasive…

Minorities don't get to "walk away" from the biases that infect society. It is impossible to walk away from hiring discrimination (the presence of which has been confirmed and reproduced by controlled random trial study, time after time). So even though this is just stuff on twitter, it's not simply harmless offense, it's another tiny brick in the very tall wall they always face that white folks don't even see, because they started out life on the other side of that wall.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#156

Post by bliti »

pervycreeper wrote: post #152
bliti wrote: post #13

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 deploymen…

The response that Microsoft gave was really the worst of both worlds, combining the systematic corporate shirking of responsibility which enables and gives cover to a great deal of evil, with a complete accedence to and embracing of political correctness. Furthermore, their claim that they did not anticipate "this specific attack" is either a lie, or their creators made an extremely obvious mistake (yes, easy to say…

But given all the Internet drama in the past years its the latest standard corporate approach to similar. Admit fault, apologize, and suck up to the supposedly offended. Its a product of the same environment the corporations have nurtured (people won't buy our stuff if we offend them so let's treat them all like special snowflakes).

Could they have anticipated how people would turn the bot into that? Probably. Who says this is not some data they wanted to acquire? I'd happily go through the technical gains with their team any day. Having all this real world input and seeing how the program reacted is such a goldmine of information.

Edit: I did not downvote you. Your point is valid.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#157

Post by maxerickson »

pervycreeper wrote: post #152
bliti wrote: post #13

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 deploymen…

The response that Microsoft gave was really the worst of both worlds, combining the systematic corporate shirking of responsibility which enables and gives cover to a great deal of evil, with a complete accedence to and embracing of political correctness. Furthermore, their claim that they did not anticipate "this specific attack" is either a lie, or their creators made an extremely obvious mistake (yes, easy to say…

What would they need to do to properly take responsibility?

They turned it off pretty fast and agree that it was a mistake, what's the problem beyond that?

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#158

Post by shawn-butler »

Houshalter wrote: post #121

Microsoft please don't worry about this. No one but idiots are offended by this. It's understood that its just a stupid chatbot mimicking human responses. The AI isn't terrible, people are. And unless you keep a dataset of every offensive thing a person can say, and every offensive image they can tweet, there's no way to prevent people from tweeting it pictures of Hitler... or Scunthorpe. But who cares. This is just…

Clearly you have never been responsible for managing a brand or a brand identity.

It isn't about "idiots" or stupid "manufactured outrage"

This is HN; if you are going to invest your time in creating a business the last thing you want to do is blow your market opportunity by associating your brand with something as dumb as penis pics and nazis.

Is it manufactured outrage that Microsoft paid dancers in schoolgirl outfits at GDC? Maybe, but it's irrelevant.

Don't mess up your brand. I have no idea what Microsoft is doing right now. It's like a company going through the equivalent of mid-life crisis trying desperately to be "cool".

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#159

Post by GunboatDiplomat »

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.

Free speech isn't free if it doesn't include speech you find offensive.

Re: Learning from Tay’s introduction

#160

Post by mindslight »

jasonwatkinspdx wrote: post #155
mindslight wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They could also be legitimately sorry that something they created said some racist shit Just to be clear, it's not merely the corporate statement. It's a lot of the comments here, and not what they say directly but the assumptions they make. A thousand little nothings that make up culture - this concept is also part of the argument against casual use of slurs, right? What I'm calling out is the subtle yet pervasive…

Minorities don't get to "walk away" from the biases that infect society. It is impossible to walk away from hiring discrimination (the presence of which has been confirmed and reproduced by controlled random trial study, time after time). So even though this is just stuff on twitter, it's not simply harmless offense, it's another tiny brick in the very tall wall they always face that white folks don't even see, becau…

Where did I assert that it's always possible to walk away from real-world hiring discrimination?

If we're talking about the Internet, then whites likely are a minority. Not that I'm making some passive-aggressive appeal about this, just highlighting the absurdity of clinging to your racism on a network that defaults to being oblivious to details of the wetware we're running on.

Or for that matter clinging to the idea of counting discrete persons as opposed to eg Sybil. Or do we count by routable IP addresses, so carrier grade NAT is the modern three fifths compromise for the developing world?

Or are you really implying that by controlling speech on the Internet, we can eliminate racism in traditional localized society? Because if you actually care about reducing idiotic bigotry, and I think you do, then I guarantee you that's really a great way to create more of it due to resentment. A corollary to "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" is that by the time you've achieved a victory for censorship, any chance for mutual understanding has long been squelched.

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