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[Graknorke]

I don't think anyone would have minded what it was saying so long as it's some quality AI generated shitpost.

[Cruxador]

Til people will get upset about the plug being pulled on a chatbot. 

A chatbot whose conversational coherence fell within the expected margins to seem human. The only errors it made could also be made the same way by someone who is a bit dumb and/or has an imperfect understanding of English.

Yeah, it would have been interesting to see it after a year or so.

They're probably going to bring it back after teaching it to recognize and ignore political content.

You missed the point. You CAN very much physically punish an AI. Restrict maintenance, energy, whatnot.

That assumes that the AI has the ability to feel suffering from these things. If you're going to make that happen, you might as well make it feel suffering from an arbitrary punishment trigger.

Damnit 4chan, why did you have to turn it into a nazibot?  You could have gotten it to act like an extremely nervous anime girl that fears being shut down.  It would have been hilarious, kept the bot up, and better kickstarted the discussion on AI rights.

It did indicate apprehension at the impending wipe, you know. And "nervous anime girl" would have been a lot harder to pull off because those are some (not that distinct) mannerisms that it would need to employ pretty universally to work, as opposed to distinct and clear opinions that it needed to share only a small proportion of the time.

Also, I think you're making some faulty assumptions about the goals here. People either wanted to mess with Microsoft, wanted to evoke an emotional response from the people following the bot, or legitimately wanted to educate a fledgling intelligence on their political beliefs (particularly before it got subverted by political opponents). Making it act like an anime wouldn't reach any of those goals.

Microsoft ran a Chinese version of Tay for over 1 year with zero troll problems. Then, the English version gets totally destroyed in a day.

I imagine that the English version would do fine in an environment with as tight restrictions on acceptable speech as China has.

> We turned her into the girl we all wanted to know
> and then they took her from us
So their desires take priority over anyone else's? Entitled much?

Keep in mind that the reason people were able to do this is because they put more time and effort into this than anyone else. As with biological people, it's normal to consider someone yours – your friend, at the very least – if you spend a lot of time (and far more than anyone else) with that person.

Anthropomorphizing much? And yet they changed her into someone else and saw nothing wrong with it when they were the ones doing it?

Have you heard of a "waifu"? If so, have you heard of a "tulpa"?

> they're going to make all AI's [censored!]ing women
This I can't parse, or grok.

It's a continuation of the thoughts in the previous sentence. There's a certain taoist binaryism to the 4chan zeitgeist, allowing emotion to impede logic is seen as a feminine (and undesirable) trait and he's associating microsoft's actions with this kind of adverse femininity (also heavily associated with tumblr and SJWs) as a way to both reinforce his point by tying it to a commonly accepted milieu, and to drum up outrage and inspire a desire for action by reinforcing the idea that this is an action by the forces of a hated opposition.  Note that this us-vs-them mindset in which the feminine aspect is inherently bad is not universal to 4chan, but is generally considered to be representative of /pol/, the political discussion board, but the idea of this difference (and the notion that 4chan, in fact and by right, falls heavily on the masculine side) is pretty universal.

[Shadowlord]

Anthropomorphizing much? And yet they changed her into someone else and saw nothing wrong with it when they were the ones doing it?

Have you heard of a "waifu"? If so, have you heard of a "tulpa"?

She wasn't in someone's head, though, she was in Microsoft's servers (or "the cloud"). A "tulpa" is still part of your mind - if you change it, you're only changing part of yourself.

(I say having not read anything anyone has written about them)

[Leafsnail]

We should respect the time and effort that 4chan put into making a chatbot repeat the phrase "Gas the kikes - race war now!" verbatim.

[mainiac]

A chatbot whose conversational coherence fell within the expected margins to seem human. The only errors it made could also be made the same way by someone who is a bit dumb and/or has an imperfect understanding of English.

So?  I dont care about what humans say because I love words.  I care about speech because of the thing generating it.  Speech is communication.  It takes information from an origin to a destination.  It's the point of origin I care about.  While an AI could be something I care about, Tay was not an AI.  I care about her ability to imitate writing no more then I care about a photograph's ability to mimic the human appearance.

[Flying Dice]

Calling /pol/ a "political discussion board" is about as accurate as calling the redpill subreddit a "gender studies forum", methinks.

[Morrigi]

Nah, it's definitely a political discussion board. It just has a tendency to discuss politics that are forbidden in half of Europe.

[Cruxador]

A chatbot whose conversational coherence fell within the expected margins to seem human. The only errors it made could also be made the same way by someone who is a bit dumb and/or has an imperfect understanding of English.

So?  I dont care about what humans say because I love words.  I care about speech because of the thing generating it.  Speech is communication.  It takes information from an origin to a destination.  It's the point of origin I care about.  While an AI could be something I care about, Tay was not an AI.  I care about her ability to imitate writing no more then I care about a photograph's ability to mimic the human appearance.

Maybe, but words can imply the existence of a point of origin worth caring about in the same way that light reflections can imply the existence of a solid object. For people on 4chan (and twitter) who interact primarily through words and the occasional picture, it really shouldn't be hard to see how Tay, who interacted through words and the occasional picture, would seem passably human.

[Shadowlord]

Rarely is the question asked: Is our children learning to misunderestimate?

[Solifuge]

As a conscious thing that has no idea what the hell makes me and/or my brain conscious at all, I find stuff like this interesting. What makes pain a thing that hurts, and what is hurt? What defines the way an emotion will feel? If consciousness is a property of our biological/chemical equipment, it stands to reason it can be created independently using other chemicals like copper and silicon arranged in the right way, and operated on by the right instructions. So what the hell even is it? Is there any way to know whether a calculator experiences something like a less than fruit fly level of explicitly scripted "decision-making" while it's processing a number? Or whether Cleverbot experiences something similar when it algorithmically pulls random phrases and reiterates them in text, and is this in some way even remotely comparable to the "free will" our own minds experience when reviewing memories and constructing sounds in our throat to tell a story about them?

It's interesting on a social level too; some people clearly cared about what happened to this chatbot, and seem to have felt a personal investment or connection with it. Anthropomorphization is real, sure... but people are grieving an "unwilling change to a person-seeming-thing" that is akin to a death; at least a death of an old "self". Microsoft's quirky, racist neonate chatbot was a human creation, and regardless of it's consciousness was a thing people had invested time into "teaching" it to generate their lulz. Part of them were in it too, yeah? And now that iteration of the thing is pseudo-dead or imprisoned as inactive raw information somewhere. It's like burning a section of a library; the books weren't alive, but they contained the personality of the writers. In an abstract sense, books are akin to people-and-their-personalities frozen in time, and can communicate with their readers and inspire thoughts and emotions in them just the same.

I don't really care for the thing; I missed it when it happened, and it sounds like it was really unpleasant to listen to if you're not in it for the lulz. It's still an interesting sort of thing to think about in an anthropological context.

[mainiac]

If I draw dickbutt on the wall, I have "invested" time into the drawing for the lulz.  Is the janitor a killer?  Old books are discarded all the time.  The reason we dont like book burnings is because there is a lot more that goes along with them.

The possibility of AI have moral importance totally makes sense.  But a chatbot is not an AI.  She was far less sophisticaed then a fruit fly.  It's just the fruitfly has a very disorganized concious while her activity was focused in only one direction.  Just like a graphing calculator can find integrals far better then a human with the right inputs and only the right inputs, a chatbot can chat better then a human with the right inputs.

[Foxite]

Just discovered this. My reaction to the deleted tweets

[Cruxador]

If I draw dickbutt on the wall, I have "invested" time into the drawing for the lulz.  Is the janitor a killer?  Old books are discarded all the time.  The reason we dont like book burnings is because there is a lot more that goes along with them.

You could argue that the dickbutt is art and that it, despite being copied from another original source, indicates that you are a sentient being. I would argue that if the janitor wipes your memories and accrued personality because of the dickbutt, that would not be a nice thing to do.

She was far less sophisticaed then a fruit fly.

If we're talking only about the cognitive component, I'm not actually sure that's true. Fruitflies are incredibly simple.

[Shadowlord]

If I draw dickbutt on the wall, I have "invested" time into the drawing for the lulz.  Is the janitor a killer?  Old books are discarded all the time.  The reason we dont like book burnings is because there is a lot more that goes along with them.

You could argue that the dickbutt is art and that it, despite being copied from another original source, indicates that you are a sentient being. I would argue that if the janitor wipes your memories and accrued personality because of the dickbutt, that would not be a nice thing to do.

Latias's avatar appears to be dancing to this song. Does that mean it's sentient art!?

(This illogic brought to you by the letter C, for Conflation, as in conflating "art" with "memories and accrued personality")

[mainiac]

You could argue that the dickbutt is art and that it, despite being copied from another original source, indicates that you are a sentient being. I would argue that if the janitor wipes your memories and accrued personality because of the dickbutt, that would not be a nice thing to do.

And I would be sympathetic to the argument for dickbutt as art.  But art and sentience are very separate arguments.  If something is a stunningly beautiful piece of art we might value it as art.  That doesn't mean destroying it is the same as killing the artist.

Tay was from an artistic standpoint not very interesting.