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Microsoft's Cortana Doesn't Put Up With Sexual Harassment (hothardware.com)
MojoKid writes: Not long after Apple unveiled its Siri personal assistant to the world, it took very little time before people began asking her outrageous questions, sometimes inappropriate or just humorous, if for no other reason than they just could. When creating Cortana, Microsoft was well-aware of what its digital assistant was going to have to deal with, so, believe it or not, it was designed in such a way to handle abuse in a specific manner. According to Microsoft's Deborah Harrison, who is one of eight writers for Cortana, a chunk of the earliest queries were about Cortana's sex life. A specific goal was to make sure Cortana wasn't treated as a subservient. If she's insulted, she doesn't apologize or back down. She handles it with tact, so as to reduce the chance of further abuse.
We're talking to a fucking machine. There shouldn't be any sexual harassment when talking to a machine.. It's not like you're actually calling a person and asking them about their sex life.
The damn thing better be subservient. It's my phone and I can abuse it if I want to. Honestly I can't see myself propositioning my phone but the first time the thing comes back at me with a put down it's not long for this world. As an aside I remember a guy that came into my shop TDY and he had just gotten a new iPhone with Siri when all that started at Apple. One of our guys asked it where the nearest whorehouse was as a joke and it brought up a list of escort services. We all laughed but 3 of the guys came in the next week with new iPhones. An accurate answer to any question should be the standard.
A good AI (outside of some sort of drama-like context imposing constraints on what works) should be configurable, to have as much or as little subservience as you want. That's what ownership means.Your computer should do whatever you want it to.
Blah blah Slashdot + read article blah blah.
But really, the summary is pretty much the article. There's no actual content.
All they discuss is the loose intention. No examples, discussion of how that intention was tested or even challenges in design.
This is barely a sidebar article in a checkout-lane magazine.
What is this, a weakly veiled invitation to discuss sexist issues de jeur? I'm cool with that, I just don't appreciate the tactic - this article is mega-weak.
Alright - I'll give you a better one:
Question: How many angry feminists does it take to screw in a light bulb?
Answer: That's NOT funny.
Discuss.
That is true, but also used to describe some pretty ridiculous people. People who genuinely consider themselves in the same league as people who put themselves in the way of bodily harm to advance the civil rights movement back in the day. Except they are just posting stuff on the internet and sometimes fighting against purely imagined circumstances, and sometimes launching into campaigns of harassment against the stray random person who makes even a slightly insensitive twitter message, saying they deserve to be fired and blackballed in the industry, and all sorts of things.
It's the campaigns of harassment that I find particularly unsettling, as they don't take any effort in understanding the perspective of the person who offended. For example a young man I knew in high school would say some pretty intolerant things about gay people. Ultimately it was an expression of his difficulty coming to grips with being gay himself, and fortunately he found the right friends and support to get him through it. I shudder to think if he had to go through that today in a more public forum and earn the wrath of some of these people, going after him relentlessly and trying everything they can figure out to further ruin his life moreso than how screwed up he was by his predicament.
Some of these people are more bully than 'educated caring intelligent people', doing what they can to feel better about themselves first and foremost, thinking they are doing 'good'.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
SJWs are just the icing on the cake of this mess.
You have to remember that Win10 (and specially cortana) is actually actively spying on your every move and giving your shit to microsoft to sell to whatever pay first, and microsoft is pretty much trying to force this spyware on you with their every strength, even downloading the OS behind your back via updates and going to a point where they're actually making both intel and AMD make CPUs that only work with win10.
Lewd conversation to a crude AI bot is "universally looked on as bad"? Oh, I see what you're doing...
Your premise is that sexual harassment of real humans is bad. We are agreed on this.
Your hand-waving bullshit is that talking to a chat bot somehow "fuels" sexual harassment of real people.
You thus equate something harmless with something immoral and often criminal.
That's not even thought crime - it's pre-crime. It's an unsubstantiated hypothesis about a causal relationship. "I think people who do A are more likely to do B, so we'll ban A."
Here's the thing: Cortana isn't a human. It barely mimics the dullest human in responding to the requests it's designed for, let alone actually experiencing the emotions of a real human. To create some sort of etiquette around this chatbot is an insult to actual humans, who bear very little resemblance to Cortana. By asking people to treat Cortana as if human, even when this comparison is patent nonsense, you're not elevating the status of Cortana - you're lowering the status of humans.
You might as well ask people to treat a banana as a human because they share about half the DNA. "Treat bananas like humans!" - if your premise is that humans+bananas are so similar - becomes equivalent to, "Treat humans like bananas!"
Cortana is nothing like a human. Humans should be treated with the utmost respect. Cortana should be treated like a simple piece of computer software, and whether I want to use emacs' Eliza mode to write the next best seller or copy-paste LOL DONGS a thousand times is of no consequence.
Sorry but this is as asinine as saying the video game Doom makes people into mass murderers.
Oh seriously, just stop making baseless assumptions about people. People are saying that it's just a machine, because it's just a machine!
Then you have the gall to imply that the same people are women haters.
So yes, I do think you're a moron, and I worry that you can't see the difference in between humour/seriousness and inanimate creations and actual living organisms.
One of the selling points for Cortana, for the Android at least, is "Have a little fun in your down time — ask anything, get jokes, and much more". Sex is something that is a lot of fun to a lot of people. Treating sex-based queries as harassment is immature. If I want to flirt with Cortana, I'm not hurting anyone. If I'm someone who lives a particularly open sex life, and I want to talk to Cortana about sex in a mature fashion, I'm not hurting anyone. So, why exactly is an AI allowed to have a 'sense of humour', but not a 'sex life'?
Having a sex drive is a normal, healthy thing. Wanting to explore that sex drive is also a normal, healthy thing. As long as complete consent between all adult *living* parties is observed, then I fail to see how anything can be construed as harassment.
I'm not suggesting that Cortana be programmed with the ability to have in-depth erotic conversations or cybersex. I am stating that treating sex and sexuality as a hostile act (i.e. "harassment") is wrong.
- People are tired of the SJW shitposting.
I'm tired of dickheads using the term SJW at every possible opportunity as if it's an automatic argument winning statement.
If you are unable to discuss the nuances of human behaviour without reverting to standard name calling, then please go somewhere else.