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0 pointsgwern4y ago0 comments

Possibly all of it. As best as I can tell, there may have been a few milquetoast rudenesses, of the usual sort for language models, but the actual quotes everyone cites with detailed statements about the Holocaust or Hitler seem to have all been repeat-after-mes then ripped out of context. It's hard to say given how most of the relevant material has been deleted, and what survives is the usual endless echo chamber of miscitation and simplification and 'everyone knows' which you rapidly become familiar with if you ever try to factcheck anything down to the original sources. (This is why lots of people still 'know' Cambridge Analytica swung the election, or they 'know' the Twitter facecropping algorithm was hugely biased, or that 'Amazon's HR software would only hire you if you played lacrosse', or 'this guy was falsely arrested because face recognition picked him' etc.) If you look at the very earliest reporting, they mostly say it was repeat-after-me functionality, hedging a bit (because who can prove every inflammatory Tay statement was a repeat-after-me?), and then that rapidly gets dropped in favor of narratives about Tay 'learning'. (Even though if you look at the chatbot code MS released later, it's not obvious at all how exactly Tay would 'learn' in the day or so it had before shutdown.)

Anyway, long story short, the Tay incident is either entirely or mostly bogus in the way people want to use it (as an AI safety parable). The real story, of an `echo` gone wrong, is vastly less interesting, and is about as important as typing '8008' into your calculator and showing it to your teacher.

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operator-name4y ago· 2 in thread

Searching "tay ai" into Google images leads to a handful images that show the initial comment are clearly not "repeat after me" responses. Of those that exist, most of them have been pretty offensive.

gwernOP4y ago

I think you are being insufficiently mediate-literate and skeptical and willing to take screenshots at face-value, given that I just demonstrated that a widely-cited example is in fact maliciously and misleadingly edited to remove the context and lie to the viewer about what happened. Did any of the coverage you read mention that? No, they did not. So why do you trust them on everything else and assume they did a good job researching and factchecking when they were so clearly wrong on that one? Why do you believe the others are not repeat-after-mes? Shouldn't the burden of proof be on anyone who claims a specific tweet can be trusted even if those others are bad?

If I go through 'tay ai' (as I have before), I see much the same thing: I see a lot of clearly edited squirrely images, which remove all of the context, and when they appear to include context, the UI looks wrong (some of these are clearly using the 'Replies' tab on the Tay page, instead of being on the actual convo thread; why? to remove the context with the repeat-after-mes or which would show Tay is just spitting out lots of canned generic responses, of course), and like some tweets are being edited out and the remainder spliced together. Do you really think that a 2016-era mass market chatbot (sub-char-RNN in power, often relying on heavily engineered template/script databases) really knows how to do Trump memes complete with clap emoji? What dataset has those? Of course not. It's just a repeat-after-me where the initial tweets were edited out. (What? Someone edit a screenshot, especially where no one can check the original, to score political points? You really think someone would do that - just go on the Internet and tell lies?)

If we look at ones which seem semi-legitimate, like the genocide one, then all we are seeing is typical chatbot evasiveness and generic Eliza-level responses, cherrypicked out of the 100k or so tweets Tay made before they were all deleted. "Do you support $X?" "I do indeed". Wow! Stunning evidence that 'Microsoft turned an advanced AI loose on the Internet and trolls taught it to be evil', as the narrative goes.

So, like I said. All of the long, coherent, strikingly detailed and most offensive ones appear to be either blatantly or probably repeat-after-mes, while the plausible ones are empty chatbot spacefilling cherrypicked out of countless thousands of tweets and made to look more offensive by implying they are the same as the troll-written repeat-after-mes. Neither one supports the broad narrative Tay is used for by OP. And we can note that, beyond the points I've raised here like "how on earth did it 'learn' so quickly" and "there is no evidence it even had 'learning' turned on", there is generally a striking lack of replications of Tay. Which is exactly what you would expect if all the really offensive ones were due to a single ill-considered repeat-after-me feature left enabled, and the rest are just chatbot phaticisms.

operator-name4y ago

You obviously have a lot more skin I the game here and seem to be presenting arguments against points I never suggested or implied.

> then all we are seeing is typical chatbot evasiveness and generic Eliza-level responses

Having found an archive of replies (https://imgur.com/a/iBnbW) "plausible ones are empty chatbot spacefilling cherrypicked out of countless thousands of tweet" seems apt.

In my mind this was the "lesson to be learned" is a HCI one rather than a technical one.

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