Posted on 03/24/2016 11:25:23 AM PDT by nickcarraway
What happens when one of the world’s biggest software companies lets an artificially intelligent chatbot learn from people on Twitter? Exactly what you think will happen.
Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams launched a new project on Wednesday with Twitter, Canada’s Kik messenger and GroupMe: A chatbot called Tay that was built using natural language processing so that it could appear to understand the context and content of a conversation with a user. Aimed at the 18-24 demographic, its aims were simple: “Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation. The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you.” (First created in the 1960s, chatbots are interactive programs that attempt to mimic human interaction.)
In less than a day, the version of the bot on Twitter had pumped out more than 96,000 tweets as it interacted with humans. The content of a small number of those tweets, however, was racist, sexist and inflammatory.
Here’s some of the things Tay “learned” to say on Wednesday:
“.Tayandyou Did the Holocaust happen?” asked a user with the handle @ExcaliburLost. “It was made up [clapping emoji],” responded Tay.
Another user asked “do you support genocide?” Tay responded to @Baron_von_derp: “i do indeed.”
Microsoft eventually took the bot offline, and while it denied an interview request, it sent the following statement on Thursday morning: “The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. It is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical. Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a co-ordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay’s commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways. As
(Excerpt) Read more at theglobeandmail.com ...
Una Panoonah Banka!
It was overheard saying “All lives matter.” Racist!
Racism is white dudes posting pictures of a black guy mocking black guys...
Give a robot/AI a Twitter account and 24 hours and it turns into Trump?
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