Chatbot Tay Calls into Question Intelligence of Software
June 30, 2016
Chatbots are providing something alright. These days it’s more like entertainment. Venture Beat shared an article highlighting the latest, Microsoft’s Tay chatbot comes back online, says it’s ‘smoking kush’ in front of the police. Tay, the machine-learning bot, was designed to “be” a teenage girl. Microsoft’s goal with it was to engage followers of a young demographic while simultaneously learning how to engage them. The article explains,
“Well, uh, Microsoft’s Tay chatbot, which got turned off a few days ago after behaving badly, has suddenly returned to Twitter and has started tweeting to users like mad. Most of its musings are innocuous, but there is one funny one I’ve come across so far. “i’m smoking kush infront the police,” it wrote in brackets. Kush is slang for marijuana, a drug that can result in a fine for possession in the state of Washington, where Microsoft has its headquarters. But this is one of hundreds of tweets that the artificial intelligence-powered bot has sent out in the past few minutes.”
Poised by some sources as next-generation search, or a search replacement, chatbots appear to need a bit of optimization, to put it lightly. This issue occurred when the chatbot should have still been offline undergoing testing, according to Microsoft. But when it was only offline because of learning bullying and hate speech from trolls who seized on the nature of its artificial intelligence programming. Despite the fact it is considered AI, is this smart software? There is a little important something called emotional intelligence.
Megan Feil, June 30, 2016
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, publisher of the CyberOSINT monograph
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