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Of course I'd be offended. Racist slurs cause actual harm (by supporting a longstanding environment of racist thought and action, and by causing distress in tho
by Steuard 14y ago
Of course I'd be offended. Racist slurs cause actual harm (by supporting a longstanding environment of racist thought and action, and by causing distress in those who are targeted). To paraphrase a blog post I've recently read, impact is what defines harm, not intent. (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-harvey/its-not-about-the-onion-i_b_2786840.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jennifer-harvey/its-not-about-...)
If you write a bot and let it participate on IRC, you are ultimately responsible for what it does there. If there's a bug that makes it spew random ASCII text twenty times per second that clogs the channel and makes it unusable, that's your fault. If it spews racist hatred and makes minorities unwilling to participate (or makes bigots feel emboldened and at home), that's your fault too.
When your nanobots go haywire and start converting the entire planet into grey goo, I will blame you. (For all the good it'll do me.)
- jlgreco 14y agoIf I am made aware of what my IRC bot is doing, and refuse to sanitize its corpus, then it would be reasonable to call me a jackass. I see no such refusal in this instance. Otherwise though? It would be plainly irrational to become angry at me for writing a bot that, during the course of it's remixing, reveals or highlights racism on IRC. To put a finer point on it, if I make a twitter bot that immediately echos anything you tweet it, and one day someone says something offensive to it, am I to blame? Of course not, that is absurd. A markov chain bot is different in no way relevant to this discussion.