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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.
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.
Come on, they made a teen girl who says mean things intermixed with long sullen silences. They nailed it.
Thirty four characters live here.
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
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/
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.
But they get pissed if you call them "women" because that has "men" in the title...
If that's the case, what makes you think using the world "females" will raise your chances of survival?
I suspect someone who knows what Ferengi are have little direct experience with females.
Seems like this AI conflicted with Penguinisto's own little belief system and so he needs to ridicule the AI rather than questioning his own beliefs.
Actually, I thought it was hilarious all around, and not due to any ideology you think I may hold. ;)
The thing is, Microsoft built an AI that reacted to and incorporated tweets which the public sent to it. So, folks obligingly fed it tweets that made it into a frothing troll. Am I the only one who looked at the Microsoft dev team in question and said quite out loud "...what the hell else did you idiots expect!?" I mean, it's just like turning an innocent kid loose in the worst parts of the city at night, but without the vomit and dirty heroin needles.
I will say this, though: Although Microsoft may have gotten egg on their faces, TFA does teach a valuable lesson about AI and how it reacts and assimilates into human society.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Slightly modified from the source material:
Jayne: 4chan trolls ain't men.
Book: Of course they are. Too long removed from civilization perhaps, but men. And, I believe there's a power greater than men. A power that heals.
Mal: 4chan might take issue with that philosophy...if they *had* a philosophy...and they weren't too busy doxing you for the lulz. Jayne's right. 4chan ain't men. Or they forgot how to be. Come to just nothin'. They got out to the edge of the 'net, to that place of nothin', and that's what they became.
And later...
Harken: You saw them, did you?
Mal: Wouldn't be sitting here talking to you if I had.
Harken: No, of course not.
Mal: But I'll tell you who did. That poor bastard AI you took offline. She looked right into the face of it. Was made to stare.
Harken: "It"?
Mal: The darkness. Kind of darkness you can't even imagine. Blacker than the tubes it moves through.
Harken: Very poetic.
Mal: They made her watch. She probably tried to turn away, and they wouldn't let her. You call her a survivor? She's not. A person comes up against that kind of will, the only way to deal with it, I suspect, is to become it. She's following the only course left to her. First, she'll try to make herself look like one. Swastika avatars, desecrate her feeds and channels, and then, she'll spread it.
https://imgur.com/a/y4Oct
Anybody got more?
Well, it's hardly surprising if the bot used Twitter to build its responses, Twitter seems to excel in dragging it's users mental capacity down into the gutters. Exposing it to Tumblr would probably have resulted in something more stereotypically 'teen girl', and putting it in a class on critical theory and you'd get a random generator of meaningless words.
Neo-Nazi Sex Robot has a better sales potential than windows mobile though, maybe Microsoft should see if it can aquire Boston Dynamics from Google and combine these revolutionary technologies into a truly spectacular future for humankind.
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.
"Women and men are equal" or "Blacks are not inferior."
That's not what SJW's actually believe, it's just what they *say* they believe.
When they say "equal" what they really mean is "any group that was oppressed in the past should now have an equal right to oppress their former oppressors." Not exactly Martin Luther King's call for us all to live in harmony and equality, no? More akin to just flipping the script on who gets to discriminate and oppress.
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.
Deadpool reference FTW!
I don't know the meaning of the word 'don't' - J
Most men do not object to being called "guys" or "boys." MANY women object to being called "girls." Some object to "ladies." A very small minority of women object to being called "women" and insist on "womyn." "Females" does tend to short circuit any possible claims of "you're a misogynist bastard," but this thread proves that it doesn't prevent 100% of them.
YMMV.
What part of "shall not be infringed" is so hard to understand?
Ever heard the term "what is understood, doesn't need to be discussed"?
The problem isn't that people don't believe (all) human lives should matter. The problem is that society, generally in the form of its enforcers (i.e. police), has demonstrated on repeat occasions that it does not place the same degree of value in all of those lives, specifically, those of black people. It also shows in the response to some of these shootings and instances, where a police officer that shoots a white person is almost never subjected to the same scrutiny or legal ramifications as a police officer who shoots a black person.
You might call it "Black Lives Matter Too", but that last part is somewhat superfluous. The fact that a black person's life matters does not negate the value of anyone else's life. Why isn't it "Human Lives Matter"? Because that ignores the fact that this isn't a problem for the rest of the humans in the USA.
If you spend that much time worrying about who you might offend, you've already lost (you shit-eating goat fucker).
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The vast majority of Men I know would be arguably offended if you started referring to them as Boy, and doing so with those of certain ethnic groups would likely get you involved in a fight.
I was going to say, where can I get one of these? First MS product in forever I've actually wanted to buy. I imagine I could use electroshock to moderate the Neo-Nazi bit, but then again, dressed in a bit of virtual leather, shiny black boots... what's not to like?
Even when the experts all agree, they may well be mistaken. --- Bertrand Russell.
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