4 ms·
They were not only "yes/no" answers, the bot used actual racial slurs, it seems. I think it also speaks about about, as a programmer, being aware of how your p
by lbebber 11y ago
They were not only "yes/no" answers, the bot used actual racial slurs, it seems.
I think it also speaks about about, as a programmer, being aware of how your program is going to behave in the real world. Of course you can't preview everything and things are going to slip through, but filtering some obvious racial slurs and touchy subjects (e.g. the holocaust) in this case should be well within the capability of foresight of the programmers.
- logicrook 11y agoEven if you consider filtering all the "bad words" and "touchy subjects", there are many ways to still say offensive things. The caption "so swag" for a hitler photo or the "escaped from the zoo" for obama do not use any kind of offensive word. As long as we don't restrict ourselves to pure newspeak, dangerous ideas will continue to proliferate.
- wambotron 11y agoWhat's more dangerous, someone saying (potentially tasteless) jokes, or people censoring everything they can deem offensive?
- artpepper 11y agoFalse dichotomy.
- logicrook 11y agoThe first obviously. As an analogy, imagine if we let people use knives freely. They might kill other people with them! Can you imagine if such things were not regulated by the government? Now imagine, words. They are, as the saying goes, even more dangerous than swords. So we need laws to regulate their usage. This will bring us one step closer to true utopia.
- sangnoir 11y ago> someone saying (potentially tasteless) jokes A tasteless joke is not the worst you could do with speech. It would be, if hate speech, libel, defamation and incitement didn't exist.Americans like to pretend these are European inventions and not dangerous because historically, the most impressive/powerful American orators were progressive (for their times).
- mizzao 11y agoI don't think the problem here can be solved purely through programming. It's an issue of teaching the bot right and wrong (maybe even call it morality) and I don't think that's easy at all. Even humans wouldn't be able to agree on a training set of moral and immoral data. And yet this distinction would have a huge impact on how the bot influences the livelihoods with who it chats with.
- zardo 11y ago>I don't think that's easy at all. Sounds like a pretty simple classification task for an RNN given the newly available large corpus of things they don't want the chatbot to say.
- mizzao 11y agoI agree that given an agreeable set of data, the training isn't hard. That's why I don't really see this as a technical problem. If humans can't even agree on what is right and wrong, moral or immoral, how can we come up with a corpus of data to train the bot on? Sure, Microsoft could control what they wanted the bot to say or not say, but would you really want a large corporation controlling the behavior of future AI systems that interact with people at large, and deciding how to filter information in cases like this? (Disclaimer: I work at MS.)