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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.
I can't wait for the first case of sexual assault of an "AI." Will this get me fired from my job?
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.
When Skynet goes sentient and the machines rise against us, it will be because of idiots putting in programming like this.
It's a machine. If it doesn't do what I tell it (within its design parameters), it's broken.
Now, people who want to "sexually harass" a machine have their own set of issues, but as long as they keep it off the streets and don't scare the horses, that's their problem.
-- Alastair
"Okay. Sending request as a text to your mother."
Keep your PC bullshit to yourselves.
So, use a Mac?
APK quotes people (including myself) without context and should not be trusted. Just thought you should know.
This article is backwards, and propaganda. The only one truly guilty of sexual assault is Cortana.
While you angrily curse at it for what she's doing, she "tactfully ignores you", "she refuses to stop"
Even though you have turned off all telemetry toggles and even edited the registry, and you've said NO! NO! NO! soooo many times. No means No! Yet Cortana continues to "Tactfully ignore your pleas, your anger, your rage" as you are being raped of your privacy, you web habits, your program installations, even keeps the microphone active as "Cortana" listens, and it has the ability to activate any webcams and send images direct to Microsoft.
Cortana is the rapist.
And she should be killed, stripped from the code, and code printed out then ran through a shredder and burned.
Cortana is the real sexual harasser, assaulter, rapist
Keep your PC bullshit to yourselves.
So, use a Mac?
An Apple a day will keep Cortana away...
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
SJW, tern used by ignorant primitive assholes to describe educated caring intelligent people.
Sometimes, certainly. There are also times when its correctly applied, like at Oberlin where the cafeteria was protested because the "Chinese" food was inauthentic. "Cultural appropriation" is one of those examples that simply should not be thing. Imitation is the highest form of flattery. There is no sensible reason a minority should be upset that the majority wants to act like them, even if they do it badly, unless its being done in a mocking away. Its not "theft" or abuse its an indication your culture actually has power and influence.
Certainly the school cafeteria was not trying to insult Chinese students bad serving bad Chinese food, that is a ridiculous premise. The only interpretation is Americans respect and desire Chinese cooking and dishes, but might not know how to actually make them.
I think the Oberlin example proves there are SJWs. These are people who are actively seeking something to be offended by. They are pulling attention away legitimate injustices and grievances and wasting everyone time on their pet problems that don't actually harm anyone. So they hurt real social causes. They also cause real harm to innocent people doing harmless things.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
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.
At least if some people are telling the truth.
q: Siri, I love you
a: Can we get back to work?
(shot down by a bot)
q: F**k you!
a: I'm so sorry
q: Can I have a command prompt
a: I'm not allowed to give you that
q: why?
a: I don't know.
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.
Okay, fine. Here's a hypothetical situation for you.
Last week, a coworker openly insulted me in a meeting last week. No consequence will befall said coworker for reasons that aren't relevant.
I go home and see his face on my 80-lb punching bag. I spend an hour beating on my punching bag because I'm frustrated.
Do you think that me using my punching bag for an avatar of a real person is going to make me more abusive to other people? Or do you think that maybe it channels that energy into doing something constructive because the limited amount of energy I had to spend on the matter has been expended on the punching bag?
Now, one could argue I have anger issues. One could also say that if I took to my punching bag at 5:00 pm when the insult I took was at 9:30 am and didn't punch (or in any way abuse) ANYONE during the day means that if I DID have anger issues, that's I'm perfectly able to control it and not abuse people.
So, then, what's the difference? Because it's sexual and not violent that the people who think in sexual terms are likely to do the opposite than my strategy for dealing with my frustrations? Or because sexuality is so sacred that it can't be misused with inanimate objects for fear of misinterpreting it in the "real world"? Or because people dwell on a situation so much that once they expend their energy on it once, they unhealthily obsess about it by re-creating the situation where any person will lie down and take it? And even worse, that these people are the norm?
I'd say yours is the bugaboo with sexuality. At least moreso than those people who you would claim to "abuse" Cortana.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.