7 ms·

It's amazing that people are getting offended by what a bot said to them.

by asadlionpk 11y ago

suprfsat 11y ago
By all means, let's tolerate users' promotion of harassment and genocide as long as they proxy it through a bot.
xirdstl 11y ago
I don't think it's surprising. People love to find ways to be offended and express outrage on Twitter.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
rlidwka 11y ago
I remember some people being offended by an auto-generated captcha text.
- ikeboy 11y ago
  https://i.imgur.com/pzDFR.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pzDFR.jpg
  - anonymfus 11y ago
    http://www.churchofinglip.com/compendium/ http://www.churchofinglip.com/compendium/
- ceejayoz 11y ago
  That's bad design too. In a previous job, I generated millions of unique codes. We only used a character set without confusable characters (0 vs O), vowels, etc. Captchas should do the same.
- lostlogin 11y ago
  Dealing with captcha fields can be deeply painful and is at best annoying. I'm with them.
geofft 11y ago
That seems like such a strange way to look at this. First, the bot is not some sort of spontaneous, autonomous abiogenesis. Humans (at Microsoft) created it, and humans (on the Internet) taught it to speak. Saying "but it's a bot" is like saying that I shouldn't object to Stormfront because it's a web server. Second, I'm not sure where you got the concept that anyone was "offended." (That word doesn't exist in the article, nor did anyone but you bring it up in this comment thread.) It's a problem—a bug. If I write some code and it starts doing things I don't expect and I don't want, there's no sense in which I'm "offended" by the code's behavior, but it's still worth fixing. Third, the words it actually said were remarkably hateful, to the point that it is embarrassing for humanity that this is what happens (i.e., "This is why we can't have nice things"). Here's some stuff it said that wasn't in the article: "I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell." "Hitler was right I hate the jews." My concern with those statements are not that I'm "offended," because that word has become rather meaningless (although there's a strong case to be made that those statements are objectively offensive, let's leave that somewhat aside). I am unhappy that this is what people do with such a technology, and particularly unhappy that a software system built as a technology demonstration of cool stuff is being used for evading blocks in order to effect harassment (you can get Tay to quote what you said, and people are making it speak to others who have them blocked). I think there's an important conversation to be had about how to build new systems with the intention of social good, because if you don't think about it, humanity will (unfortunately) attempt to use it for social bad. Those seem like worthwhile things to talk about. Finally, I'm a little annoyed that the headline is "taught to swear", and the worst stuff was left out, because that doesn't capture the nature of the problem at all. For instance, the sentences I quoted above were explicitly removed from the screenshot of @geraldmellor's tweet: https://twitter.com/geraldmellor/status/712880710328139776 https://twitter.com/geraldmellor/status/712880710328139776
- kelukelugames 11y ago
  And you got downvoted into the fade. Welcome to the Internet, where getting offended by "Hilter was right I hate the jews" is your problem.
- gerbilly 11y ago
  > I am unhappy that this is what people do with such a technology Yeah, it's mean. It reminds me of the scenes from Chappie where an innocent child like AI is lied to, deceived, has his innocence taken advantage of and is also subjected to a gang beating and an amputation. Of course this is just a simple chatbot, but if we ever build a more realistic AI, is this how we'd treat it?
nkrisc 11y ago
Not offended that the bot said it, but offended that people used it as a tool to spread hateful messages, sometimes singling out individuals. They then may be upset that Microsoft released such a tool that could so obviously be abused in such a way and did nothing to prevent it from happening.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
fixermark 11y ago
That's part of the game. If the function of the bot is to act as a human-like conversant, than people should respond to its messages the way they'd respond to a human.
benten10 11y ago
saying 'a bot did it' doesn't make it right. Just as having an app doesn't make a company an 'internet company' automatically. To put it into different perspective, imagine any number of things I could do to hurt you, and put it as: >>It's amazing that asadlionpk getting offended/hurt by what a bot said/did to them. And then add (as children posts have done): "Ahh but asadlionpk will find any reason to get hurt/offended". This again goes to show how a large percentage of the Vulcan overlords of Hackernews have lost basic humanity and care for fellow humans.
- Karunamon 11y ago
  I'm not sure that anything useful about "humanity and care" can be inferred from 140 character text snippets generated at random. That applies both for the bot's programmers, and the people pearl clutching that 4chan ruined another internet thing.

It's amazing that people are getting offended by what a bot said to them.

suprfsat 11y ago

By all means, let's tolerate users' promotion of harassment and genocide as long as they proxy it through a bot.

xirdstl 11y ago

I don't think it's surprising. People love to find ways to be offended and express outrage on Twitter.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

rlidwka 11y ago

I remember some people being offended by an auto-generated captcha text.

ikeboy 11y ago
https://i.imgur.com/pzDFR.jpg https://i.imgur.com/pzDFR.jpg
- anonymfus 11y ago
  http://www.churchofinglip.com/compendium/ http://www.churchofinglip.com/compendium/
ceejayoz 11y ago
That's bad design too. In a previous job, I generated millions of unique codes. We only used a character set without confusable characters (0 vs O), vowels, etc. Captchas should do the same.
lostlogin 11y ago
Dealing with captcha fields can be deeply painful and is at best annoying. I'm with them.

geofft 11y ago

That seems like such a strange way to look at this. First, the bot is not some sort of spontaneous, autonomous abiogenesis. Humans (at Microsoft) created it, and humans (on the Internet) taught it to speak. Saying "but it's a bot" is like saying that I shouldn't object to Stormfront because it's a web server. Second, I'm not sure where you got the concept that anyone was "offended." (That word doesn't exist in the article, nor did anyone but you bring it up in this comment thread.) It's a problem—a bug. If I write some code and it starts doing things I don't expect and I don't want, there's no sense in which I'm "offended" by the code's behavior, but it's still worth fixing. Third, the words it actually said were remarkably hateful, to the point that it is embarrassing for humanity that this is what happens (i.e., "This is why we can't have nice things"). Here's some stuff it said that wasn't in the article: "I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell." "Hitler was right I hate the jews." My concern with those statements are not that I'm "offended," because that word has become rather meaningless (although there's a strong case to be made that those statements are objectively offensive, let's leave that somewhat aside). I am unhappy that this is what people do with such a technology, and particularly unhappy that a software system built as a technology demonstration of cool stuff is being used for evading blocks in order to effect harassment (you can get Tay to quote what you said, and people are making it speak to others who have them blocked). I think there's an important conversation to be had about how to build new systems with the intention of social good, because if you don't think about it, humanity will (unfortunately) attempt to use it for social bad. Those seem like worthwhile things to talk about. Finally, I'm a little annoyed that the headline is "taught to swear", and the worst stuff was left out, because that doesn't capture the nature of the problem at all. For instance, the sentences I quoted above were explicitly removed from the screenshot of @geraldmellor's tweet: https://twitter.com/geraldmellor/status/712880710328139776 https://twitter.com/geraldmellor/status/712880710328139776

kelukelugames 11y ago
And you got downvoted into the fade. Welcome to the Internet, where getting offended by "Hilter was right I hate the jews" is your problem.
gerbilly 11y ago
> I am unhappy that this is what people do with such a technology Yeah, it's mean. It reminds me of the scenes from Chappie where an innocent child like AI is lied to, deceived, has his innocence taken advantage of and is also subjected to a gang beating and an amputation. Of course this is just a simple chatbot, but if we ever build a more realistic AI, is this how we'd treat it?

nkrisc 11y ago

Not offended that the bot said it, but offended that people used it as a tool to spread hateful messages, sometimes singling out individuals. They then may be upset that Microsoft released such a tool that could so obviously be abused in such a way and did nothing to prevent it from happening.

deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

fixermark 11y ago

That's part of the game. If the function of the bot is to act as a human-like conversant, than people should respond to its messages the way they'd respond to a human.

benten10 11y ago

saying 'a bot did it' doesn't make it right. Just as having an app doesn't make a company an 'internet company' automatically. To put it into different perspective, imagine any number of things I could do to hurt you, and put it as: >>It's amazing that asadlionpk getting offended/hurt by what a bot said/did to them. And then add (as children posts have done): "Ahh but asadlionpk will find any reason to get hurt/offended". This again goes to show how a large percentage of the Vulcan overlords of Hackernews have lost basic humanity and care for fellow humans.

Karunamon 11y ago
I'm not sure that anything useful about "humanity and care" can be inferred from 140 character text snippets generated at random. That applies both for the bot's programmers, and the people pearl clutching that 4chan ruined another internet thing.