Blouse Magazine

GARBAGE I
GAR
But that's only part of it. The company also added some fixed “editorial”
content developed by a staff, including improvisational comedians.
And on top of all this, Tay is designed to adapt to what individuals tell
it. “The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience
can be more personalized for you,” Microsoft's site describes Tay. In
other words, Tay learns more the more we interact with her. It's similar
to another chat bot the company released over a year ago in China, a
creation called Xiaoice. Xiaoice, thankfully, did not exhibit a racist, sexist,
offensive personality. It still has a big cult following in the country, with
millions of young Chinese interacting with her on their smartphones
everyday. The success of Xiaoice probably gave Microsoft the confidence
that it could replicate it in the US.
Given all this, and looking at the company's previous work on Xiaoice, it's
likely that Tay used a living corpus of content to figure out what to say,
says Dennis R. Mortensen, the CEO and founder of x.ai, a startup offering
an online personal assistant that automatically schedules meetings.
“[The system] injected new data on an ongoing basis,” Mortensen says.
“Not only that, it injected exact conversations you had with the chat bot
as well.” And it seems that was no way of adequately filtering the results.
Unlike the hybrid human-AI personal assistant M from Facebook, which
the company released in August, there are no humans making the final
decision on what Tay would publicly say.
Mortensen points out it that these were all choices Microsoft made.
Tay was conceived to be conversant on a wide range of topics. Having a
static repository of data would have been difficult if Microsoft wanted Tay
to be able to able to discuss, say, the weather or current events, among
other things. “If it didn’t pick it up from today, it couldn’t pick it up from
anywhere, because today is the day it happened,” Mortensen says. Microsoft
could have built better filters for Tay, but it may not have thought of
this at the time of the chat bot’s release.
Meanwhile, depending on their purpose, other chat bots might be
designed to have a much narrower, much more “vertical” focus, like
Mortensen’s own online personal assistant. Some chat bots, he explains,
just talk about sports or food or music, or are programmed to do one
thing, like set up meeting appointments through e-mail. Those are the
cases when you can have much more minute control over the universe of
responses for the chat bot, and when unleashing it to the world becomes
much less risky.
As for why, of all its options, Tay seemed to consistently choose the
most incendiary response possible, Mortensen says this is just how this
kind of AI works. The system evaluates the weighted relationships of two
sets of text-based questions and answers (in a lot of these cases) and
resolves what to say by picking the strongest relationship. And that
system can also be greatly skewed when there are massive groups of
people trying to game it online, persuading it to respond the way they
want. “This is an example of the classic computer science adage,
‘Garbage in, garbage out,’” says Oren Etzioni, CEO of the Allen Institute
for Artificial Intelligence.
THE FEMALE VOICE
All of this somehow seems more disturbing out of the ‘mouth’ of someone
modelled as a teenage girl. It is perhaps even stranger considering
the gender disparity in tech, where engineering teams tend to be mostly
male. It seems like yet another example of female-voiced AI servitude,
except this time she’s turned into a sex slave thanks to the people using
her on Twitter.
This is not Microsoft’s first teen-girl chatbot either; they have already
launched Xiaoice, a girly assistant or “girlfriend” reportedly used by 20
12 | Blouse Technology Issue