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Comment by bliti | Hacker News Reader

This reads like science fiction:

Learning from Somebot's introduction.

Last week we deployed Somebot to $location. Our confidence in Somebot was high because we had thought about all likely scenarios in our comfortable offices. We are deeply sorry and assume the full responsibility from Somebot's actions. Moving forward we will make sure to include safeguards to reduce the amount of pain caused by Somebot's deployment.

Our deepest condolences to the families of the affected and to the survivors. Megacorp cares about your well being. To help cover expenses from the tragedy we will deposit $money in your Megacorp account.

God bless the federated nations of Megacorp.

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Learning from ED-209's introduction.

Last week we tested ED-209 at our corporate headquarters. Our confidence in ED-209 was high because we had thought about all likely scenarios in our comfortable offices. We are deeply sorry and assume the full responsibility from ED-209's actions. Moving forward we will make sure to include safeguards to reduce the amount of pain caused by ED-209's deployment.

Our deepest condolences to the families of the affected and to the survivors. Omnicorp cares about your well being. To help cover expenses from the tragedy we will deposit $money in your Omnicorp account.

God bless the federated nations of Omnicorp.

P.S. And we would be remiss if we did not note that they did, in fact, have 20 seconds to comply.

because we had thought about all likely scenarios in our comfortable offices.

Or because they had real world experience with another bot in a similar situation:

"In China, our XiaoIce chatbot is being used by some 40 million people, delighting with its stories and conversations."

Interesting that it worked in China and not here. I'd like to read about the difference rather than a bland apology.

If I had to venture a hunch, it likely has something to do with a difference in culture.

Also the whole government control and censorship of the internet thing.

That wouldn't be an issue for just offending people, but only if it became political. Don't forget the US also has government control and censorship - try posting child porn on Twitter and see if the government leaves you alone.

I think the Chinese likes an Internet prank just as much as anybody else and are just as capable at using social networks to organize one.

I meant technical differences of implementation.

Almost only Chinese people speak Chinese. However, many people speak English (I come from Spain, for example), so in this case you can hardly pin it on a single culture.

I think in this case it has to do more with 4chan's culture than a regional culture.

I kind of read the "... but it worked in China soooo...." bit of the announcement as somewhere behind a kind of sad sigh and an angry scowl. Maybe Mandela got it wrong, maybe a society should be judged by how it treats its chatbots?

That's what happens when networks get social.

> Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay.

I think it just didn't get a coordinated attack like this. I'd guess this type of attack needs to happen close to launch to be a high percentage of it's interactions to influence it so strongly.

dick jokes resulting in concentra^^^Reeducation camp might have something to do with it.

It sounded like XiaoIce was a chatbot hosting individualized conversations, so it wouldn't be a platform for rebroadcasting bad stuff.

Where exactly is "here" though? Twitter is global remember? Anyone in the world, including Zambia where I am could have interacted with Tay. That's a very different proposition to "China".

The response that Microsoft gave was really the worst of both worlds, combining the systematic corporate shirking of responsibility which enables and gives cover to a great deal of evil, with a complete accedence to and embracing of political correctness. Furthermore, their claim that they did not anticipate "this specific attack" is either a lie, or their creators made an extremely obvious mistake (yes, easy to say in hindsight, but it's really hard to believe that this possibility would not occur to competent implementers).

But given all the Internet drama in the past years its the latest standard corporate approach to similar. Admit fault, apologize, and suck up to the supposedly offended. Its a product of the same environment the corporations have nurtured (people won't buy our stuff if we offend them so let's treat them all like special snowflakes).

Could they have anticipated how people would turn the bot into that? Probably. Who says this is not some data they wanted to acquire? I'd happily go through the technical gains with their team any day. Having all this real world input and seeing how the program reacted is such a goldmine of information.

Edit: I did not downvote you. Your point is valid.

What would they need to do to properly take responsibility?

They turned it off pretty fast and agree that it was a mistake, what's the problem beyond that?

IMHO the response from Microsoft was fine. They admitted the mistake and taken the bot offline. What else should they do? What I find strange is that nobody criticizes twitter for not doing anything... I think Facebook would deal better with this.

Something like this was bound to happen at some point; I think it's much better that it happened with a chatbot than an AI system that could actually control (physical) things other than a Twitter account. I think it's a landmark in the history of AI and a valuable lesson for system designers going forward.

Also, a lot of people are saying "well, of course that was obvious". But it really wasn't, because there was a huge team working on this with past experience building a conversational agent. The armchair theorists forget that it always looks obvious to Captain Hindsight.

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