I think it also speaks about about, as a programmer, being aware of how your program is going to behave in the real world. Of course you can't preview everything and things are going to slip through, but filtering some obvious racial slurs and touchy subjects (e.g. the holocaust) in this case should be well within the capability of foresight of the programmers.
As long as we don't restrict ourselves to pure newspeak, dangerous ideas will continue to proliferate.
A tasteless joke is not the worst you could do with speech. It would be, if hate speech, libel, defamation and incitement didn't exist.Americans like to pretend these are European inventions and not dangerous because historically, the most impressive/powerful American orators were progressive (for their times).
Even humans wouldn't be able to agree on a training set of moral and immoral data. And yet this distinction would have a huge impact on how the bot influences the livelihoods with who it chats with.
Sounds like a pretty simple classification task for an RNN given the newly available large corpus of things they don't want the chatbot to say.
If humans can't even agree on what is right and wrong, moral or immoral, how can we come up with a corpus of data to train the bot on?
Sure, Microsoft could control what they wanted the bot to say or not say, but would you really want a large corporation controlling the behavior of future AI systems that interact with people at large, and deciding how to filter information in cases like this?
(Disclaimer: I work at MS.)