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Comment by Buge | Hacker News Reader

>> “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.

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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.

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