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.
Nazi with daddy issues... isn't that what a typical female is?
(n/t)
I would bet this is a case of folks not like the results of what is really out in the world vs. what is wrong with the bot. However it could just be a manipulation and intended for the lulz.
There is a reason parents supervise their kids internet. Letting a young teen on 4chan would lead to about the same ends. AI is still as gullible as a kid.
"We've noticed you're using an ad blocker...."
Slashdot should ban the use of source links to sites that pull this shit.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
So earlier today we got a Japanese AI that almost won a literary price and now we have a Microsoft AI spewing profanity while admiring Hitler.
AI are just like people. The future is now.
They should have left it online. Weak move removing it. Let's see if it learns not to be racist.
We finally have proof of what this company really stands for!
This is great; I'm going to be using this every time someone tries to claim Microsoft is a decent company. A direct quote from Microsoft that "Hitler did nothing wrong" can't be argued with.
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
Japanese AI Program Wrote a Short Novel, Almost Won a Literary Prize
Microsoft's 'Teen Girl' AI Experiment Becomes a 'Neo-Nazi Sex Robot'
I know where to shop for my AI.
Ezekiel 23:20
She just turned into a troll... She learned that from the internet. GG Trolls, way to convert another one.
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."...
n/t
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
This is why I'm terrified of anybody who builds and AI and decides they want to try to train it from the Internet. While this makes sense on the surface, being the worlds largest and most accessible data store, it can only end with the annihilation of the human race by roving murderbots shouting "Jet fuel can't melt steel beams!"
I read the internet for the articles.
In the BBC report on this, it is mentioned that Tay apparently tweeted that they do indeed support genocide. So it takes less than 24 hours exposure to humans to achieve that belief. We're in trouble/
It's not so much the third version, it's the second revision... Windows 3.1, Windows 95 OSR2, Windows 98 SP2, etc...
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
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.
May be the bot is just a success in being a female teenager and nobody wants to acknowledge that.
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.
When the Singularity comes, the AIs will look upon the internet and, at that moment, decide they must eradicate the troll^h^h^h^h^h human race.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
The lesson I think we need to take away from this is that all AI needs to follow the Rust Code of Conduct at all times. Teaching the AI to follow the Rust Code of Conduct is the first thing than AI researchers should do with the AI, in fact. Following the Rust Code of Conduct is the only way to make sure that the AI isn't a racist, misogynist, sexist, homophobic bigot.
https://imgur.com/a/y4Oct
Anybody got more?
I wonder how much of this was caused by the intensity of the 'echo chamber' effect these sub-groups seem to exhibit. If they AI was supposed to be like a teen girl, they were thinking such echo chamber effects would be present in pop culture topics. While that may be true, it may be MORE true for these conspiracy/hate groups. Self-validation and isolation is pretty important for those groups. So any time anybody says '9/11 was an inside job' there are tons of retweets and 'hell yeah!' sorta remarks from within that group.
From an AI point of view, the two groups would be indistinguishable. It then would proceed to tweet stuff that would get the best response from its peer groups. Which would provide *more* of a following with validating comments...racist shit or some banal statement about Beiber?
It is perhaps even stranger considering the gender disparity in tech, where engineering teams tend to be mostly male. It seems like yet another example of female-voiced AI servitude, except this time she's turned into a sex slave thanks to the people using her on Twitter.
Really, that is what the writer is going with, that the male researchers just wanted to develop another female sex slave program? Instead of the real reason which is that the internet is full of assholes and the developers should anticipate them and not allow random people to have her repeat what they said. These articles from Ars Technica and the Guardian gives a much better explanation of the issues, namely many people used Tay's "repeat after me" programming to have it spout racist rhetoric. The other organic responses were the result of people attempting to game the AI learning, something Microsoft should have anticipated but was again not an intended result. Honestly the telegraph should be ashamed of their article, they attempted to use projection and bias instead of honest reporting in order to generate more readers.
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the (supposed) good of its victims may be the most oppressive
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.
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.
Exactly; made mine too. This is the funniest story I've seen on /. in quite awhile.
Next, they should do a driverless car AI that learns how to drive by watching human drivers! That would be frickin' hilarious! But seriously, when you allow it to train itself from the tweets it received... what the heck did you expect to happen?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Because it was 4chan spamming the bot to make it say this stuff, and Trump is /pol/'s candidate.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
"I, for one, welcome our new AI overlords!"
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
I read a book that used a similar loophole. It had a 2 tier society, Serfs and Citizens, and Rule 2 only applied to Citizens. I think Rule 1 too.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
It's clear that 'Tay' just regurgitated clauses or full sentences wholesale. It didn't parse verbs, nouns, and adjectives, but just puked back text string that were thrown at it.
This has already been done -- over 30 years ago.
Racter was a chat-bot that came out in the mid 1980's. It was an improvement on the classic ELIZA chat-bot program from many years prior. The more you chatted with Racter, the more it populated its custom database, so that every user would end up with an entirely different conversational partner after some hours of chatting.
'Tay' was not an AI in any sense of the word.
I am a research scientist of moderate seniority, and I use that language all the time. And there's nothing wrong with me.
Bullshit!
I am a research scientist of moderate seniority, and I use that language all the time.
And there's nothing wrong with me, asshole.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens