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Comment by apalmer | Hacker News Reader

I am not understanding the spin that is being displayed in general with regards to Tay.

Microsoft created a chat bot, the chat bot chatted. It wasnt a failure on any technical level as far as i have seen.

Do you really not understand that there are failures other than "the chat bot chatted so its ok"? Do you not realise there might be other requirements for software than "it kind of appears to do roughly what someone asked for"?

I understand completely but what i am saying is... they set out as far as i know to create a social media chat bot that sounds like a teenage girl who is immersed in her social media environment. it didnt fail this in any way as far as i can tell. its just that...

a teenage girl who speaks the language of her social media environment is going to say a lot of dumb outlandish stuff. even if hypothetically this were some deeper than NLP true AI breakthrough it was always going to say outlandish crazy offensive things because that's the influence that's feeding into it.

its similar to how to a degree that recent bipedal robot that was in the videos got some backlash because its human like motion was offputting... the robot didnt fail in anyway...

its more a question of why would you spend all this money rolling out these experiments if you didnt want the very forseeable output. its a no brainer that a chat bot that learns from social media is going to say fucked up shit.

It's a failure of censorship. Like someone else pointed out, they should have had a simple blacklist of certain words.

That's not as easy as it seems. See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scunthorpe_problem

and

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/273516/how-do-you-impleme...

Oh, thanks for the references. I'm constantly astonished at how people can think "filter bad words" would fix everything. In some instances of Tay tweets, there are comparisons between black men and monkeys. What words should you forbid? Black, man, or monkey? Should the bot be allowed to speak about people of color visiting a zoo?

This is supposed to be AI. I'd expect it to know what words and phrases mean, and how sentences are structured. I'd expect it to know that some people are black, and people can visit zoos, and zoos often contain monkeys. I'd also expect it to know that comparing people to other animals is potentially offensive, and to avoid saying those things just to be on the safe side.

You certainly can't make it perfect, but in this case, where the submitter is effectively anonymous and they're not paying for the service, you should be able to justify the occasional false positive.

It wouldn't result in a very smart or fun AI. Tay was supposed to be fun because of its intelligence. Throwing a braindead solution intended for dumb forum software would run counter to the project's goals in my opinion.

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