[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).