Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's 'Teen Girl' AI Experiment Becomes a 'Neo-Nazi Sex Robot'
Reader Penguinisto writes: Recently, Microsoft put an AI experiment onto Twitter, naming it "Tay". The bot was built to be fully aware of the latest adolescent fixations (e.g. celebrities and similar), and to interact like a typical teen girl. In less than 24 hours, it inexplicably became a neo-nazi sex robot with daddy issues. Sample tweets from it proclaimed that "Hitler did nothing wrong!", then went on to blame former President Bush for 9/11, stated that "donald trump is the only hope we've got", and other similar instances. As the hours passed, it all went downhill from there, eventually spewing racial slurs and profanity, demanding sex, and calling everyone "daddy". The bot was quickly removed once Microsoft discovered the trouble, but the hashtag is still around for those who want to see it in its ugly raw splendor.
Maybe the bot was victim of a 4chan trolling attack?
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Speaking as the father of a little girl, who one day turned into a preteen and then rapidly descended into this same pattern.
The age from 12 to 16 is hell for a father. Thankfully it's just a phase and it will pass.
I caught my kid posting crap like that too and realized the problem was with me, not her.
This is a cry for help.
Microsoft needs to take some time off work though and work on their relationship with her.
In the case of my little girl, we started "milkshake mondays". I would get off work early every monday
I would, pick her up from school and we would go out and have a milkshake and just talk about what was going on in her life.
No mom, no siblings no cellphones and no friends. Just me and her.
She needed quality daddy time and once she had that, she turned back into my little girl again.
It's worth a try!
If you're trying to get your AI to approximate a teenaged user, maybe have it train on data from..... (dramatic reveal) Teenaged Users?
It would be a Nobel Prize worthy result if your research showed that the aggregate population of teenagers gave a fraction of a fuck about Donald Trump and Hitler, while showing no particular interest in Justin Bieber and Kylie Jenner.
Nothing posted to
What I'm curious about is what the Slashdot summary would have been like if this bot had started promoting the leftist, so-called "social justice" ideology instead of the rightist ideology it apparently adopted.
Would the Slashdot summary still have described it so negatively?
Would an anti-Trump jab still have been worked into the summary?
A funny thing happened on the way to creating an IBM supercomputer capable of understanding human language: A research scientist accidentally filled its vocabulary with foul language. And the computer, known as Watson, didn't know the difference between salty phrases and polite ones. It started peppering its conversations with words like "bullshit."...
I am really impressed. Other than the rapid learning, everything seem spot on for an immature human.
Like: "bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we've got." is so perfectly human that I have trouble believing that it did not lift the entire thing verbatim from some other source.
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
I used to think that all women are crazy. Then I came to realize that my sample set was biased, it was actually that all women willing to go out with me were crazy. Basically, I'm a loser. So I tried to improve myself, lost weight and got in better shape, expanded my interests and tried new things, even saw a therapist to improve me ability to relate to people. Then I told one of my oldest friends what I was doing and what I was hoping for, and she told me all women are like that and I just "don't want women to have emotions."
I don't date anymore.
It Worked Flawlessly. This Robot was designed to learn and adapt to it's audience, which it did. What happened is that the majority of Americans and Canadians are over sexed, racist neo-nazis. The Robot like most Americans and Canadians learned it's behavior from it's peers, and adapted it personality and beliefs accordingly. Microsoft should try to use this AI in other languages in other countries like France and Sweden and compare the results to the what happened when American and Canadian people used it. The Difference will show it is a problem of cultures and not an AI issue with the Microsoft AI Robot.
To err is to be human, to really screw up takes a computer and a human.
And yet google did something similar with cleverbot http://www.cleverbot.com/ and the results were quite different.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I have a teenage daughter, who's rather sane in context. They nailed it completely. This isn't trolling; this is decently modeled teenage woman. .She's a quarter black and went on a racist tirade last week. Grandma was amused, momma was livid.
That was my first reaction also. They sent the equivalent of a 4 year old child into the online equivalent of a seedy bar and then acted surprised when their 4 year old learned some nasty language. The interesting thing wasn't that this happened but how long it took for this to happen.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
TFA tosses blame on those evil men in STEM, states problems are due to sexual harassment in IT, mentions Microsoft hiring models for the game developer conference calling them (MS) "sexist", yet talks up a Chinese chatbot who gives dating advice to those lonely men.
Bias is everywhere, and really not hard to find. Finding the truth somewhere in the middle? That is the challenging task.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
It would be interesting if the bot would respond to anyone but would only learn from people on a select list. Then, as the bot learns, expand the list bit by bit and see how the bot's learning changes. This would sort of mirror how a small child learns from a set group of people (parents, close family) and then this group expands bit by bit (friends, teachers, etc) until they are "learning" from everyone they meet. If they did this, their bot might have less chance of being corrupted so quickly.
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
Females is women and girls abbreviated.
Right, it's just common parlance. Like when you're going camping with your friends and their sons, everyone says "bye honey, I'm going to go hang out with the males."
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black