Tech
Microsoft apologises for chatbots inappropriate tweets
The colossal and highly public failure of Microsoft Twitter-based chatbot Tay earlier this week raised many questions: How could this happen? Who is responsible for it? And is it true that Hitler did nothing wrong?
After a day of silence (and presumably of penance), the company has undertaken to answer at least some of these questions. It issued a mea culpa in the form of a blog post by corporate VP of Microsoft Research, Peter Lee:
“We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay…
“Tay is now offline and we’ll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values.
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“Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack. As a result, Tay tweeted wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images. We take full responsibility for not seeing this possibility ahead of time.” Lee added.
The exact nature of the exploit isn’t disclosed, but the whole idea of Tay was a bot that would learn the lingo of its target demographic, internalizing the verbal idiosyncrasies of the 18-24 social-media-savvy crowd and redeploying them in sassy and charming ways.
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