Girly teenage robots? Photo by elkbuntu.
There are three things I want to talk about today:
- Microsoft’s inadvertently racist Twitter bot, Tay.ai / @TayandYou.
- A comic that a-u-t-o-x is releasing soon.
- My visit to the dentist today (I swear I have a reason to bring it up).
Unless you’ve been off the internet for a few days, you ran into Tay, a Twitter bot that Microsoft released as PR (?!?!) for their in-house machine learning capabilities. This was an utterly predictable catastrophe. Tay processed the text people tweeted at her and mimicked it back. Trolls quickly figured out the mechanism and made her say a bunch of neo-Nazi nonsense.
“What Tay reminds us: AI may or may not be scary. Humans who train AI are terrifying. Or, humans in general are terrifying.” — Hugh McGuire
Usually I try to stay away from posting a bunch of links, but other people have already said all the smart things. These articles overview the facts:
- “Microsoft is deleting its AI chatbot’s incredibly racist tweets” by Rob Price
- “How The Internet Turned Microsoft’s AI Chatbot Into A Neo-Nazi” by Alex Kantrowitz (spoiler: 4chan + 8chan)
Wisdom from people who have dealt with systems like this before:
- “Hey Microsoft, the Internet Made My Bot Racist, Too” by Anthony Garvan
- “Microsoft’s Tay is an Example of Bad Design” by Caroline Sinders
- “The Ongoing Lessons of Tay” by thricedotted
And then Allison Parrish commented in the #botALLY Slack group:
“re: tay, yesterday before any of the really bad stuff went down, I quote-retweeted something that mentioned the account and then the account @-replied me… so I blocked it, thinking how annoying it was that this bot that has Twitter verified status isn’t complying with the letter or the spirit of the API ToS
like, many people must have been involved in decisions to get this bot live, on the part of the group at microsoft AND at twitter
and the fact that no one involved apparently thought of these obvious ways in which it would be a disruptive negative experience for people just… seems unfathomable
we have YEARS of precedents for applications of the Twitter API like this and even the greenest botmaker among us has a better grasp of the issues at stake than the people involved in this project”
So, that’s a whole big thing. In other news, a-u-t-o-x is releasing a comic, which will be available on his website. He told me: “it is titled WORLD L.S.D and ties in Cyberpunk aesthetics & Science Fiction themes. […] the story is simultaneously set in a futuristic city ‘Neo-F’ and outback Australia, as Neo-F is prone to jump through time sporadically.” Here is the title image:
And lastly, I went to the dentist today. (Shocker: I’m apparently brushing and flossing wrong! What a new thing to hear from a dental hygienist!) But seriously, it made me further contemplate what I said yesterday: “The future is beyond bodies. A few decades from now — and during some parts of the present — we will not be confined to flesh, nor even to brains.”
I was definitely exaggerating. It’s going to take a helluva lot longer than that. My gums are receding (see: brushing wrong, also possibly genetics) and that is a thing that I have to worry about. We live in an absurd world where the random flesh accident that you’re born into has a huge effect on your quality of life. I admit it, but I’m not pleased.
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