It took mere hours for the Internet to transform Tay, the teenage AI bot who wants to chat with and learn from millennials, into Tay, the racist and genocidal AI bot who liked to reference Hitler. And now Tay is taking a break. Tay, as The Intersect explained in an earlier, more innocent time, is a project of Microsoft’s Technology and Research and its Bing teams. Tay was designed to “experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding.”…. Although Microsoft was light on specifics, the idea was that Tay would learn from her conversations over time. She would become an even better, fun, conversation-loving bot after having a bunch of fun, very not-racist conversations with the Internet’s upstanding citizens.
It’s become fashionable to envision a future in which robots smart and capable enough to attend to our needs remove the burden of life’s more mundane responsibilities from our shoulders. Perhaps they’ll be able to anticipate what we need or want…maybe even before we know ourselves. They’ll cook our meals, do our laundry, wash our cars, and free humans to do whatever it is we do with a surfeit of free time on our hands…like binge-watching “Keeping Up With the Kardashians.”
Yeah, about that. Artificial intelligence (AI) is a dream- one that seems as if it might be just over the horizon, but a dream nonetheless. Turns out that duplicating human intelligence into something resembling AI is a surprisingly difficult and complex undertaking. While I admire Microsoft for putting Tay out there for the Internet to play with, anyone with even a passing familiarity with da Interwebz knows what can happen when you ask people to play nice.
Tay is the latest iteration of the Law of Unintended Consequence, and it seems Tay’s short time among the general population proved definitively that she wasn’t ready for prime time. AI might be the Holy Grail, the best thing since the invention of caffeine, but the Internet really does find a way to turn every to shit…and it’s easier than you might think.
This is why we can’t have nice things.
In the meantime, it looks as if you’re going to have to do your own laundry and microwave your own ramen…at least for the time being.
