| Well this gets into the much deeper issue that it's not actually an AI, it's not actually "learning." It's taking things people say and mixing them up and repeating them (someone's going to claim that that's exactly what people do, but I think it's clear that this bot would never be able to gain "true understanding" of words and meaning). In general, I think the recent wave of interest in chatbots/personal assistants is premature, these ones are really no smarter than SmarterChild, because we haven't gotten any closer to building a system that can actually assign true "meaning" to arbitrary language. The data has been modeled, cleaned and filtered by the team who built Tay, the bot’s website states.[1] 1. They did a lot of manual massaging of the data anyway. In addition, if a user chooses to share with Tay, it will track their nickname, gender, favorite food, zip code and relationship status as part of its personalization.[1] 2. These features seem hardcoded. Meanwhile, its responses – which are meant to be funny, not serious – were developed by a staff which included improvisational comedians, says Microsoft.[1] 3. It also uses scripted content. They imbued it with a totally fake personality. They made it mimic a human, it uses slang that was programmed into it. It's a hodgepodge of techniques that to me are largely "faking it." So I don't buy the idea that they just sort of turned on this learning engine and had no control over its "morality." Microsoft knew all of this, they knew it wasn't actually learning language. So what is the purpose of releasing it to talk to people on Twitter? Basically a PR stunt, to get people to have fun with it. From that perspective, a really simple blacklist of words would have gone a long way, and not compromised the integrity of its "learning" (because it was already entirely compromised). And yeah, I mean, a bit of image recognition doesn't seem out of the question either (not saying it would have prevented the bot from repeating/reposting "bad" things, but it maybe would have had some chance to develop a narrative other than "so racist and offensive it was immediately shut down"). Yeah I still do think it is obvious that you shouldn't release a fake AI bot that will blindly repost images that are sent to it by Twitter users, and that there is nothing really to be gained by doing so. [1] http://techcrunch.com/2016/03/23/microsofts-new-ai-powered-b... |