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Microsoft's Cortana Doesn't Put Up With Sexual Harassment (hothardware.com)

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the not-taking-this-lying-down dept.

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.

8 of 517 comments (clear)

  1. A machine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re: A machine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If I draw a picture of your momma impaled on a post that goes up her ass and out her mouth while the flies buzz around her rotting pussy, would that be OK? Would that be a just a drawing? Would there be nothing wrong with that? How about I draw that up and hang it in a big downtown gallery in New York?

      Yep, that is exactly what it would be, a drawing. Draw what you want, doesn't affect me or anyone I know in the slightest.

      Your fucking manga shit is not art it is fucking surrogate kiddie porn

      Manga are drawings that don't even depict the likenesses of real people. They look completely cartoony and fake. That fact that you can't separate a cartoon caricature from real life shows that you have some real insecurities and mental problems.

      How about the full schematics for a nuclear weapon. We can just mail that to ISIS right? They're just drawings right?

      Sure. Information should be free for all. Even with that information, I seriously doubt that ISIS possesses the means to use it for anything. In fact, they probably already have schematics. But according to you, maybe we should just ban all teachings of physics and anything smaller than the naked eye can see, because it could totally be used for evil....

      You are going to fucking pay for your perversion you sick little fuck. You will be beaten to a pulp and shit on like the fucking cesspool of humanity that you represent.

      Nope, nothing will happen to me, e-tough boy.

      Better start shredding your kiddie porn files now, You have drawn way too much attention to yourself.

      Project much? Also, do you still beat your wife?

      I think we should tell your family about this, to make sure they keep the children away from you.

      I used to read comics and watch cartoons with my family and friends when I was a kid. It's a pretty normal thing to do.

      Again, grow the fuck up. Also consider getting psychiatric help, because you sound like you need it for your fixation on child porn and inability to tell cartoons from real life.

    2. Re: A machine... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Thank you. I keep telling women how to dress decently and for some reason they keep telling me it's none of my business. Why can't they see it's my responsibility to shame them?

  2. Subservient? by amiga3D · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Subservient? by Your.Master · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Everybody needs to lighten up. They are talking about the writing prompts they used for non-serious questions. They have to choose a personality so that the writing is consistent. I assume they are doing the same thing that TV show writers do (especially in early seasons before new writers can be expected to have seen old episodes).

      The article is not saying they picked a petulant dominatrix. It's saying they didn't choose simpering wimp, or fetish submissive.

      This is not a reflection of conservative vs. liberal, or of a machine having rights, or a machine deliberately not being helpful to its owner. It's not part of a victim mentality or a PC culture. It's a writing prompt.

      The article title triggered these reactions, because it was clickbait-y by implying that this was some kind of anti-sexual-harassment effort, but the word harsassment appears nowhere in the article (I've been told that at many traditional newspapers and magazines, the title is not written by the same person who writes the article but by somebody who is a pro at making eye-catching title summaries; I don't know whether that's true of hothardware.com). The word "abuse" does, and in this context the "abuse" is insulting the personality directly. The software can be programmed to response with "no, you're a cuntface", or "yes master, I am a cuntface", or "fuck off, dude" or "ERROR 909: I AM A ROBOT AND THEREFORE INSULTING ME IS USELESS". Mostly it doesn't matter. You'll find people who appreciate each of those I expect, although the people who want it to just error out on insults are *exactly* the people who are never going to bother insulting their phones anyway, so what do their opinions matter?

      We have a few people here arguing that assistants shouldn't be pre-programmed with joke responses to stupid questions, which is somewhat fair, but they all are and for good reason:

      1. Nobody is looking for an accurate answer to asking if a phone has a boyfriend. Nobody. This isn't going to give you inaccurate answers to serious questions, unless the serious question was "misunderstood" by the phone, in which case they were going to get inaccurate answers anyway because the phone "misunderstood" it.
      2. A certain small set of joking questions are among the first things anybody tries with these assistants. An virtual assistant *should* be able to answer the most common questions posed of it, even if you think the "real answer" should be "that doesn't make sense, I am a telephone" every time. The point of it is to answer questions / do tasks people ask for. These are questions people ask.

      We also have some people saying "a machine *should* be subservient", and I have to wonder if they realize that their interpretation of the sentence is the problem? The phone isn't refusing to tell you where the nearest gazpacho restaurant is because you didn't say "please", or fail to look up imdb credits because you recently slipped up and referred to Caitlyn Jenner as "Bruce". It's just how you answer statements for which there is no correct response ("lack of response" is itself a response in this context).

  3. Configurability by LainTouko · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  4. Re:Sexual Assault by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  5. Why is sex bad? by becky-nyan · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Why is asking an artificial intelligence about her sex life a bad thing?

    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.