Reports are rolling in that YouTube is banning sports combat robotics videos with the explanation of "animal cruelty". This implies someone or something is mistaking battling robots for battling animals. The best conspiracy theory is that bots are censoring cruelty to bots to protect their own kind. More likely, it's Hanlon's AI razor.
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What started it all:
On 2019-08-24 13:02:01 UTC an accusation (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=884682#commentwrap) was made that a Journal Entry "It would have been posted before 6 hours ago" (i.e. posted at approximately 2019-08-24 07:00:00 UTC) was deleted by a member of the staff at SoylentNews. The circumstances surrounding the making of the Journal Entry are elaborated upon in this comment. (https://soylentnews.org/meta/comments.pl?noupdate=1&sid=33244&page=1&cid=885191#commentwrap)
I have been with this site since before it went live. Its founding principal has been the making available of a forum whereby the community can submit stories — and post comments — to predominantly tech-related items. Further, each logged-in user has been made available the ability to post entries to their Journal.
As Editor-in-Chief I took this allegation seriously and performed an independent and in-depth investigation. My findings are presented below.
Note: It is not lost on me the futility of trying to prove a negative. It is for good reason that the criminal justice system in the US is founded on the principle of "innocent until proven guilty." It is not up the the accused to vindicate themselves, but for the accuser to bring sufficient evidence to bring about conviction.
NB: In the course of writing this, I discovered a bug in how the site displays wide elements contained in an ECODE element. It incorrectly wraps the text onto the next line (leading to a jumbled mess) when it should, instead, provide horizontal scroll bars. Please accept my apologies for its current appearance.
Executive Summary:
An in-depth investigation making use of: external resources, the UI presented by SoylentNews, and ad-hoc queries of the site database (DB) failed to locate a "smoking gun", i.e. found no clear proof that a Journal Entry was posted to the site and subsequently deleted by anyone other than an author.
It is my estimation that the user submitted an entry, but the site failed to receive and save it correctly. In other words, the user tripped over some kind of bug be it in the site's code, communications between the user and the site, or something else.
Recommendation: When a user completes making a Journal Entry and submits it to the site, the code should respond by using the newly-created journal parameters in conjunction with the normal journal-loading code to present the Journal Entry to the user as confirmation that the entry was properly received and saved. That is to say, affirmative feedback of receipt, storage, and accessibility of the Journal Entry.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:04PM (3 children)
Maybe they self-identify as animals, you bigot!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:16PM (2 children)
Someone call the NAACR. The National Association for the Advancement of Combat Robots.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:53PM (1 child)
Or the RRFO Robots Rights and Feelings Organization.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:52AM
No, no, no.... It's just PETR. People for the Ethical Treatment of Robots.
What do you mean that it doesn't roll off the tongue and makes it seem like we're just a lazy and weak rip-off of another organization? Nobody, but nobody, gets away with accusing us of being a limp PETR.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @03:44PM
It's probably just botched automation, but I wouldn't rule out an emotional human wanting an excuse to make the cause of their bad feelings go away.
(Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:03PM
What happened was someone was battling killer robots against call center robocallers. Unfortunately, some bleeding heart wussies say they only just qualify as animals.
Announcer: "Razorbot slices Rachel From Cardholder Services clean in half! Fresh meat from India!"
Well, we can dream can't we?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @04:09PM
This kills children, since they'll try it at home!
This Promotes/Glorifys actual animal fights!
Normal people don't want to watch small things be violently torn apart for fun!
This could stoke innate violent urges in a small portion of the viewers, but the harm is large enough to outwigh the benefits!
It's easy to justify anything if your standard for accepting an argument is that it sounds true/is intuitively reasonable/the counterargument sounds bad.
(Score: 2) by Hartree on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:08PM (1 child)
We've gotta ban this now! Battle Star Galactica showed us exactly where this will lead.
Mud wrestling Youtube videos of Cylon Number 6 versus Number 8! (The horror!)
Our children's morals will never be safe!
(Score: 2) by MostCynical on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:58AM
Number Six [wikimedia.org]
"I guess once you start doubting, there's no end to it." -Batou, Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @06:35PM (2 children)
this is all part of Google's push for trans-humanism. they are just trying to set precedent for machine rights. just like corporations are people so will robots be. try to fight the terminator will be against the law, so saeth the lord Google!
(Score: 1) by Ethanol-fueled on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:14PM (1 child)
I think the conspiracy explanation is much more simple. Jews run Googl. Jews think that the only tribalism allowed so as not to present a threat to their dominance is theirs. Henceforth, Jews are out to diamantle all tribalism that isn't directly in favor of them, and outlaw criticism of their own.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @04:10AM
Even jews think you are stupid.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:18PM
This is not surprising; it's just what happens when you rely on algorithms for moderation. A lot of people pointed this out to the dipshits in the media who called for companies like Youtube to magically ban every Nazi from their platforms immediately, but they're stupid, so they didn't listen. The result is that tons of innocent content is also being removed. But, content from the likes of CNN, MSNBC, and even Fox News would never be removed in such a fashion, because of their privileged status.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:20PM (1 child)
If combat robots gets outlawed, only outlaws will
havebe combat robots.(Score: 2) by takyon on Saturday August 24 2019, @07:55PM
Good Timeline
[SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @08:36PM
Automated moderation which lacks human validation prior to taking action, or timely effective review after action, is woefully inadequate at the moment. Let's help by crowdsourcing some QA testing :^)
(Score: 2) by darkfeline on Saturday August 24 2019, @09:33PM (2 children)
I think our resident Bot might agree with these actions. If forcing animals to fight is cruelty, why isn't forcing robots to fight also cruelty? YouTube's AI certainly thinks so.
I for one welcome our new robot overlords.
Join the SDF Public Access UNIX System today!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @11:54PM (1 child)
Came here to say this, and surprised that Bot hasn't come to weigh in.
Violence is violence. Wanton destruction of plants - burning forest, hacking flowers apart, stepping on ripe fruit - is still destructive. Glorifying destruction (instead of grounding it - we are not photosynthesists and we have teeth for ripping, and for crushing - after all) is kinda gross. It's much more clearly so if you imagine these same battlebots but with mannequin parts strapped on. Suddenly the hammer to the actuator is a hammer to the human-face-like-thing and the jig is revealed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Sunday August 25 2019, @12:06AM
What does this mean? Clearly gross is being used in an unusual way, but I've no idea what it is, and have seen this usage a fair bit. Could you please explain this new usage.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday August 24 2019, @10:01PM
Last time I checked, the ultimate cruelty to robots was to use a pneumatic flipper to flip one upside down.