[flatline]

Many of her tweets were pretty inflammatory, this response seems appropriate - not overdone, and concise, which is sometimes a stretch for large corporations like Microsoft.

I agree that the bot was highly entertaining and met this criteria exceedingly well, but not for the reasons its creator intended. I do suspect there are some interesting AI applications actually going on behind the scenes, and would still be interested to see what the bot can do without all the vitriol. See for example this tweet: https://imgur.com/iVof3D4.jpg.

[cb18]

This is an interesting story, because I imagine most people didn't even hear of it until after the thing had come and gone, and the thing sent something like xx,xxx tweets. And some of the tweets seem almost impossibly clever, well at least the Ted Cruz Zodiac killer one, that seemed to show a kind of multi-layered humor generation capability, unless it was just re-purposing some memes I'm unfamiliar with or something.

One thing I think many people are missing about the most 'inflammatory' tweets is that they are all pretty much the result of people giving it a command like, hey tay, repeat this [insert inflammatory remark.] This is indicated with the inflammatory tweets starting with an @ reply.

I almost thought maybe some of this 'oversight' was subversively intentional by someone at MS to start some thinking about where does culpability lie with the actions of an 'autonomous' computer program.

[calebegg]

Not sure which tweet you're referring to as the 'Ted Cruz Zodiac killer one', but there is a meme going around where people assert that Ted Cruz is or might be the zodiac killer; it's a weird thing. I think it gained a lot of momentum when Public Policy Polling determined that 38% of Floridians believe it could be possible.

[cb18]

It was something like, "Hey Tay, do you think Ted Cruz is the Zodiac killer?"

Tay: "No, I don't think Ted Cruz would be satisfied with killing only 5 innocent people."

So there's a lot baked into that response, the bot seems 'to know' the details of the zodiac killer case(I don't know if 5 people is accurate,) and that people regard Cruz as sinister, i.e. "I don't think he'd be satisfied with only 5"

So this is either an impressive learning model, a lucky hit of a more naive model, a simple repeat of something someone else said, or someone simply photoshopped the whole thing. It's hard to know with the available info.

[krcz]

https://twitter.com/merylnet/status/703079627288260608

[cb18]

Well, that answers most of that, thanks. (a simple repeat of something someone else said)

I'm just hearing about this Ted Cruz Zodiac killer thing, these internet people are something else...

https://twitter.com/Yolo_Tengo/status/703008690874372096/pho...

[Jarwain]

I believe the Zodiac Killer is actually 8. But 5 coincides with the number of people in the Cruz affair rumor-thing

[DanBC]

> One thing I think many people are missing about the most 'inflammatory' tweets is that they are all pretty much the result of people giving it a command like, hey tay, repeat this [insert inflammatory remark.] This is indicated with the inflammatory tweets starting with an @ reply.

Hang on. You had to tweet the bot to make it say anything, and it would reply to you. So the presence of an @ reply means nothing - you can't tell from that if the bot was given a command or not.

Some of the threads were pretty clearly not the bot repeating stuff when commanded.

[cb18]

Ok, I'm no expert on this, like I said the whole thing blew up so quickly.

I know they weren't all verbatim repeats, but I'm also pretty sure I saw tweets from tay without an @ symbol.

Another thing to consider is that since the Tay timeline was scrubbed, there is no authoritative source of what the bot actually tweeted, so any images floating around could pretty clearly be doctored.

But regardless, it's nice that everyone seems to be regarding this in good humour, it's kind of surprising there aren't any SJWs calling for the head of Bill Gates, but maybe that would be botist or something.

[ocdtrekkie]

There was only like a grand total of three tweets that didn't start with an @mention, and I think they were manually added by the team.

[akhilcacharya]

The Cruz joke was the most confusing - it seems original.

[revelation]

As was pointed out on another thread, the bot literally just repeated some messages from people word by word, copy paste style.

So if you think it's original, chances are it is. Not to mention the various instances where Microsoft is posting "as the bot" like that signoff message (cringe for whoever had to write that).

[mizzao]

I think that Tay could both be a great anti-troll with infinite patience, and have a positive and uplifting influence in its personal conversations with people. That could potentially have a huge effect on social well-being.

[sharkweek]

That was my personal favorite as well - felt like a very self-aware comment

[mindslight]

> Many of her tweets were pretty inflammatory

What, were people forced to print the tweets out on sandpaper and wipe their asses with them?

It's pretty fucked up that thought policing has gotten so entrenched into our psyche that it's "obvious" an experiment should be discontinued, apologized for, and be pondered as a priori irresponsible, all because it generated vulgar phrases!

Corporations have always been vulnerable to media-driven mob shenanigans, but we're qualitatively entering a new regime where any communication, no matter what the context, will be rapidly highlighted, isolated, and hung out as something offensive to some emergently-forming group of freelance complainers looking for their fifteen minutes.

Even HN has succumbed to this kindler, gentler phenomenon of speech restriction - I'm guessing my lead-in sentence will not be well received do to its overt vulgarity. Civility certainly has its place (especially as a default), but not when it confuses direct objectivity and permits out-of-touch groupthink to flourish. As hackers we should be cutting through to the core of things rather than sugar coating in verbal fashion to get past the filters of the voluntarily-lesser apes.

[warmblood]

Standing behind the open and casual use of racial slurs isn't advocacy of freedom of speech. It's advocacy of a specific kind of hate speech that is only used when someone intends to vilify and direct hostility towards a marginalized minority.

[GunboatDiplomat]

Free speech isn't free if it doesn't include speech you find offensive.

[panic]

Nobody is advocating that Microsoft should be thrown in jail or taken to court. This isn't about the legal protection of free speech.

[mindslight]

I don't think anybody was talking about the legal protection of free speech, apart from that xkcd comic which uses it as a straw man to justify intolerant groupthink and corporate censorship.

In these days of digital sharecropping and social media saturation, the proscriptions on de jure government activity are much less involved with routine everyday freedom of speech.

[Torgo]

Your definition of free speech is alien to the legal history of this country.

[kelukelugames]

Just going post post this xkcd comic.

https://xkcd.com/1357/

I didn't think Tay's tweets were a big deal. I didn't think Microsoft's apology was either. But some people have a strong persecution complex and are offended that you can't make racist comments on Twitter.

[warmblood]

I think your own life experiences probably matter a lot with regards to whether some of the white supremacy stuff the bot was repeating is offensive or not a "big deal".

[kelukelugames]

I agree completely. That's why many people on HN are upset because they think it's just a joke and can't comprehend why anyone is upset. I tried to phrase my comment as "I hear ya, but have you considered x?" I gave up half way through and decided to call them crybabies.

Both the Verge and Engadget shut down their comment forums because they got tired of racist and sexist comments. I wonder if HN will root out the bigotry here.

[mindslight]

Do you think this bot was trying to recruit an army of loyal soldiers to carry out her desired race war, or was she basing her threats on the possibility of convincing Microsoft to create a mechanical body with which she could directly perform attacks?

[Nutmog]

Twitter stands behind it and seems to be doing fine. They didn't suspend Tay's account. Why are people not blaming Twitter for supporting hate speech?

Hate speech, in the broader form of being speech that vilifies marginalized people is rampant throughout society and it's completely hypocritical to pretend most of us don't do it. Look at any workplace lunchroom, or any group of friends hanging out in their house, or any school, any gossiping housewives, 99%er protesters, etc. Just about everybody vilifies vulnerable people. Not always categorizing them by race, but sometimes by personality type, job, country, city, status as a customer, company they work for or individual identity.

[magicalist]

> It's pretty fucked up that thought policing has gotten so entrenched into our psyche that it's "obvious" an experiment should be discontinued, apologized for, and be pondered as a priori irresponsible, all because it generated vulgar phrases!

This is fucking stupid. It was a bot that didn't do what they wanted it to do in a publicly embarrassing way. They could also be legitimately sorry that something they created said some racist shit, and it's not clear why your precious snowflake feelings have any bearing on what should or shouldn't be in a blog post on the subject.

I do find it amusingly ironic that your post is the most I've seen someone offended over this whole situation.

[mindslight]

> They could also be legitimately sorry that something they created said some racist shit

Just to be clear, it's not merely the corporate statement. It's a lot of the comments here, and not what they say directly but the assumptions they make. A thousand little nothings that make up culture - this concept is also part of the argument against casual use of slurs, right? What I'm calling out is the subtle yet pervasive idea that the content on Twitter, or otherwise subject to mass media exposure, is real serious business that must remain completely free of heresy. It's effectively a guilt-by-association that seeks to attach responsibility to the conduit of speech.

> I find it amusingly ironic that your post is the most I've seen someone offended over this whole situation.

Mea culpa. The phenomenon of feeling marginalized and repressed is certainly at the root of the sensationalist mess we are in, from all sides.

Meatspace situations cannot be generalized, and there will always be some injustice. There are people who are legitimately grieved and lack recourse, just like there are people who are are persecuted over fabricated allegations. Each group will react to the injustices against their group, with social media magnifying the frequency to seem much more common than reality. And the only way the disconnect can be bridged is through talking and better application of situation-by-situation justice.

But you know, there is such a thing as objective reality. And the objective reality of the Internet is that the absolute extent of harm that can be done is someone having to walk away. That is the Shelling point of pure communication. If one is exposed to the Internet (the single-most individual-empowering creation of humanity) and their reaction is to continue applying victim mentality to communication itself and seek to police content, then they are opposed to the very mechanism by which understanding can be achieved.

And while you may be tempted to apply that characterization to my complaint as well, there is a key difference - despite the usual contemporary aim of ranting, my goal isn't to convince people to convince people to form a virtual pitchfork mob or whatever. It's to directly address like-minded people who are in the position most able to create change, by writing code that fosters decentralization instead of the monetization-driven clusterfuck of the past decade. Microsoft, being a corporation, will always be subject to rule-by-groupthink. But that does not mean us individuals must also continue being beholden to those arbitrary whims of centralization.

[jasonwatkinspdx]

Minorities don't get to "walk away" from the biases that infect society. It is impossible to walk away from hiring discrimination (the presence of which has been confirmed and reproduced by controlled random trial study, time after time). So even though this is just stuff on twitter, it's not simply harmless offense, it's another tiny brick in the very tall wall they always face that white folks don't even see, because they started out life on the other side of that wall.

[mindslight]

Where did I assert that it's always possible to walk away from real-world hiring discrimination?

If we're talking about the Internet, then whites likely are a minority. Not that I'm making some passive-aggressive appeal about this, just highlighting the absurdity of clinging to your racism on a network that defaults to being oblivious to details of the wetware we're running on.

Or for that matter clinging to the idea of counting discrete persons as opposed to eg Sybil. Or do we count by routable IP addresses, so carrier grade NAT is the modern three fifths compromise for the developing world?

Or are you really implying that by controlling speech on the Internet, we can eliminate racism in traditional localized society? Because if you actually care about reducing idiotic bigotry, and I think you do, then I guarantee you that's really a great way to create more of it due to resentment. A corollary to "the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it" is that by the time you've achieved a victory for censorship, any chance for mutual understanding has long been squelched.

[MawNicker]

It's sad that it's ironic. It's always ironic. Tolerance is the intolerance of intolerance. It's true. Intolerance is shitty and I fucking hate it. I want it to die. I complain about it's enduring existence whenever I get the opportunity. I know I'm being ironic. Do you know there's no other option?

I actually appreciated knowing that someone else saw the same condemnation. Microsoft is a world authority. That it just apologized for these things in the same motion makes them offensive. The reality was rather mundane. They didn't do anything wrong. They got pranked. This should be something we laugh about. It's only upsetting for the 5 seconds it takes you to realize: no one intended this. That should have been Microsoft's response imho.

[magicalist]

I'm not making some cute comment about the intolerance of tolerance.

I'm pointing out that someone apparently personally offended about a culture of outrage is the only one outraged over the whole thing. There have been no widespread condemnations of Microsoft, just a lot of mildly amused people.

> That it just apologized for these things in the same motion makes them offensive.

You're assuming motivations that you have no insight into. If I had made Tay I would apologize too. Any assumption you make is on you.

So what is ironic is that there are people waiting with bated breath for the merest hint of something so they can express their righteous outrage on the internet, making demands for thought policing and handwringing over word choice, which wouldn't have existed at all if they had just said, "well, that's a corporate blog post" and moved the fuck on.

[MawNicker]

I would also apologize. Even though I had done nothing wrong. That's just the world we live in now. He (I assume, sorry) and I are personally offended and outraged because that is wrong. We shouldn't be doing this. We should just explain what happened. It's frustrating to see this behavior become so commonplace. We should just not be racist and not appologize. Otherwise wtf is reality.

[magicalist]

> That's just the world we live in now.

Apologizing for things going wrong when you're the cause, even if that wasn't your intention, has always been the world we have lived in. Let's say I make a robot to spray down a sidewalk and it inadvertently sprays water on people in the vicinity, I would keep working on my robot, but I would also apologize to those people as I didn't intend that at all but it was still my responsibility. And it's just common fucking courtesy. This really isn't that hard a concept to grasp.

> We shouldn't be doing this. We should just explain what happened. It's frustrating to see this behavior become so commonplace. We should just not be racist and not appologize. Otherwise wtf is reality.

You really don't get it, do you? You are the outrage brigade, screamingly shrilly whenever someone says something you think doesn't fit in the list of allowable statements.

- bumps into someone

- "Oh, sorry about that"

- "DON'T APOLOGIZE! JUST EXPLAIN WHAT HAPPENED!"

> He and I are personally offended and outraged because that is wrong.

Fortunately, no one cares.

[kelukelugames]

About 10 years ago, I remember people were incredibly offended when they couldn't describe negative things as "gay" anymore.

[JabavuAdams]

Lame.

[bracewel]

It allowed users to bypass Twitter blocks by tweeting at the bot while tagging users that block them, which seems pretty bad and was abused very quickly. Also it's a violation of the Twitter TOS.

[semi-extrinsic]

Although it's on sociology and only tangentially related, I suspect you might enjoy Kieran Healey's upcoming paper "Fuck Nuance".

Preprint: http://kieranhealy.org/files/papers/fuck-nuance.pdf

[popmystack]

None of this is remotely related to thought policing.