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by freehunter 2175 days ago
It doesn't matter how you intended for it to be taken. If you jokingly told someone to kill themselves and they did actually kill themselves, would you hide behind "they should have known I was joking"?

I read your post three times before I first commented to make sure I wasn't misunderstanding. What you claim to have said is horribly offensive and I can't believe you're trying to shrug it off as no big deal. Maybe it's a cultural difference, but hopefully what you're learning is that it may be okay to tell a human being to kill themselves in Scotland but that is not considered acceptable in the US.

1 comments

> If you jokingly told someone to kill themselves

I jokingly told an inanimate piece of software to kill itself, AI's are not people, they're machines running lines of code. But I see no point continuing to justify my "cultural" differences in the use of speech other than to say that I've known enough US folks to know that your reaction is something of an outlier. If this is truly how you feel, then I'd be curious to know how the US managed to survive having George Carlin or Bill Hicks on their tellies.

The difference is they are comedians who were commissioned to tell jokes to an audience that is expecting to hear jokes. Meanwhile you told an Amazon employee to kill themselves because you didn't like the output of the technology their company offers.

Again... there are humans behind these Twitter accounts.

@teh_klev explicitly addressed his comment to an AI. Perhaps you're not familiar with it, but this is a common acronym for https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_intelligence. Your comments are all saying the same thing and all deliberately or not missing the point that he was explicit in that he wasn't addressing a human. Any human that creates an account called "Amazon AI" can expect to receive content suitable for an AI.
They didn't create an account called "Amazon AI", they created an account called "@AmazonUK" which is what was referenced in the original comment. @AmazonUK has a human behind the account, not an AI.
And the tweet was directed at "@AmazonUK AI". It was clearly a response to something on the website, not anything the human did.

Would "@AmazonUK's AI" be clearer and satisfy you?

I would prefer humans not tell other humans to kill them selves because believe it or not some people actually do and some people really miss those people.
I told Amazon's AI to go kill itself, not their employee, which part of that do you not comprehend? There's quite a distinction there and you're being quite disingenuous.

Comedians are no different from regular people, they use the same words as the rest of us. It makes no difference whether you're paid or not to say things. If a comedian tells racist jokes they're still a racist and a bigot regardless of their job.

Edit, sorry couldn't help myself:

> Again... there are humans behind these Twitter accounts.

Are you sure ;)

How does an AI kill itself? It doesn't. But humans do.
I have no idea what you think that proves. They told the AI to kill itself, despite not expecting it to happen or be strictly possible.