Yes, I would say there are two lessons to be learned from Tay: first, the now-familiar HCI "people are why we can't have nice things" lesson (eg. why you should

Yes, I would say there are two lessons to be learned from Tay: first, the now-familiar HCI "people are why we can't have nice things" lesson (eg. why you shouldn't do free-response text fields on surveys or polls); and second, about how bad reporting and 'AI safety' discussions tend to be. This is truly basic factchecking and Journalism 101: "so, did this actually happen?" (No.) That the 'Internet racists taught Tay to be evil' legend gets repeated so much and so uncritically, not just by random commenters but by supposed experts in AI and AI safety/bias specifically, is shameful and suggests the areas are epistemically rotten. If they can't understand a simple chatbot echo function, why do you trust them on anything harder?