Warning: some offensive language from the bots. I didn’t know it was specifically 4chan involved until now; I just knew it learned from the internet.
It raises the question that if the bots can learn so fast to be racist then how easy is it for people, and what can we learn to stop or repair that?
In March 2016, Microsoft was preparing to release its new chatbot, Tay, on Twitter. Described as an experiment in “conversational understanding,” Tay was designed to engage people in dialogue through tweets or direct messages, while emulating the style and slang of a teenage girl. She was, according to her creators, “Microsoft’s A.I. fam from the Internet that’s got zero chill.” She loved E.D.M. music, had a favorite Pokémon, and often said extremely online things, like “swagulated.”
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Machine learning works by developing generalizations from large amounts of data. In any given data set, the algorithm will discern patterns and then “learn” how to approximate those patterns in its own behavior.
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On March 23, 2016, Microsoft released Tay to the public on Twitter. At first, Tay engaged harmlessly with her growing number of followers with banter and lame jokes. But after only a few hours, Tay started tweeting highly offensive things, such as: “I f@#%&*# hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell” or “Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job…”
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Over the next week, many reports emerged detailing precisely how a bot that was supposed to mimic the language of a teenage girl became so vile. It turned out that just a few hours after Tay was released, a post on the troll-laden bulletin board, 4chan, shared a link to Tay’s Twitter account and encouraged users to inundate the bot with racist, misogynistic, and anti-semitic language.
[link:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/tech-talk/artificial-intelligence/machine-learning/in-2016-microsofts-racist-chatbot-revealed-the-dangers-of-online-conversation|]
This part of a six part series that sounds very interesting so I’ll paste that as well. I’m sure some remember Eliza.
This is the fifth installment of a six-part series on the history of natural language processing. Last week’s post described people’s weird intimacy with a rudimentary chatbot created in 1966. Come back next Monday for part six, which tells of the controversy surrounding OpenAI’s magnificent language generator, GPT-2.
You can also check out our prior series on the untold history of AI.
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