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Comment by cblum | Hacker News Reader

> Microsoft released a chatbot named Tay, designed to learn from Twitter users. Within 24 hours, Tay claimed the Holocaust never happened, professed hatred for women and suggested that black people should be hanged.

> “Garbage in, garbage out,” software engineers say. Likewise, racism in, racism out. Biased developers produce biased code.

The author either made zero effort to understand how things work, or willingly chose to pass judgment on developers to drive his political point.

"Biased developers produce biased code" - absolute nonsense.

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>> “Garbage in, garbage out,” software engineers say. Likewise, racism in, racism out. Biased developers produce biased code.

Every sentence individually is true. And Tay was a case of garbage in garbage out. But the Tay case didn't involve biased developers. The garbage in came from Twitter trolls, not from the code or developers.

Exactly. I found it very dishonest that the author is trying to imply that what happened to Tay was due to developers being biased.

You don’t think developers can program defensively against their ML Twitter bot picking up racism?

Just because a developer doesn't intentionally put in code to block racism doesn't mean the developer is biased.

Doesn't it? Neglect when you otherwise would take care is evidence of bias.

They didn't put in code to block Tay from promoting cryptocurrency ponzi schemes, does that mean the developers support cryptocurrency ponzi schemes?

If "otherwise take care" means block every form of bad thing, they aren't otherwise taking care.

No. Not against racism specifically, but against being gamed by trolls. In this case, there's nothing special about racism. If it wasn't that, the trolls would have gamed the chatbot to have it push anti-vaxxer talking points, or moon-hoax conspiracies, or just some random garbage.

Pretty sure the tay bot stuff was 4chan.

They were organizing on 4chan, and posting the troll messages on Twitter.

Right. In one case somebody worked out that Tay would repeat anything you wanted if you said “Repeat after me” first. Tay was just functioning as an echo, not taking on beliefs.

Source?

The linked article.

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