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Microsoft Snuffs Out AI Twitter Bot After Offensive Tweets

posted by takyon on Friday March 25 2016, @05:04AM   Printer-friendly
from the truth-is-online dept.

Sir Finkus writes:

Microsoft's new AI Twitter bot @tayandyou was shut down after only 24 hours after it began making "offensive" tweets.

The bot was built "by mining relevant public data and by using AI and editorial developed by a staff including improvisational comedians," and designed to target 18-24 year olds.

Shortly after the bot went live, it began making offensive tweets endorsing Nazism and genocide, among other things.

As of this submission, the bot has been shut down, and all but 3 tweets deleted.

The important question is whether or not it succeeded in passing the Turing test.

takyon: This bot sure woke fast, and produced much more logical sentence structures than @DeepDrumpf.

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by Tork on Friday March 25 2016, @07:08AM

    by Tork (3914) on Friday March 25 2016, @07:08AM (#322818)
    So... it's Microsoft's fault for not installing a troll-filter. Right.
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  • (Score: 3, Funny) by frojack on Friday March 25 2016, @07:32AM

    by frojack (1554) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 25 2016, @07:32AM (#322824) Journal

    Exactly.

    It's not like the first time something Microsoft put on the web got owned you know.

    If they left on line a few more days it would have morphed into Rick Ainsley.

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  • (Score: 4, Interesting) by mcgrew on Friday March 25 2016, @01:50PM

    by mcgrew (701) <publish@mcgrewbooks.com> on Friday March 25 2016, @01:50PM (#322896) Homepage Journal

    So... it's Microsoft's fault for not installing a troll-filter.

    Of course it is! I doubt there's a single person anywhere who doesn't know the internet is full of evil. Trolls, scammers, vandals, and they were brain-dead stupid for not taking measures.

    Hell, I wrote a chatbot program way back in 1983 that ran in 16k of memory and no disk that responded to racial slurs and profanity with put downs of the person at the keyboard.

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    • (Score: 2) by Tork on Friday March 25 2016, @03:51PM

      by Tork (3914) on Friday March 25 2016, @03:51PM (#322934)
      Right, you pre-programmed morality into your AI. Nothing wrong with that, but I'd expect MS would be criticized for doing that, too.
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      • (Score: 2) by frojack on Friday March 25 2016, @05:31PM

        by frojack (1554) Subscriber Badge on Friday March 25 2016, @05:31PM (#322987) Journal

        Maybe they would be criticized, maybe not. I suspect not, especially if done right, or at least subtly, or a modicum of thought.

        They could have simply had a bunch of words that would be ignored, not triggering a put-down or a comeback or a retaliation. Maybe Just label some of these words "bait" and let the bait-response routine do what ever.

        Sort of like we expect our kids to respond. We caution our Offspring AI (authentic Intelligence) not to assume the attitudes or speech of every person they happen to bump into. Seems silly to unleash a program onto the wide woolly internet without even a modicum of caution.

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