MS fails again

[Ray McCarthy]

Chat bots are not remotely AI. Nor "remote AI".

I don't understand why MS didn't see this would end badly.
Microsoft chatbot is taught to swear on Twitter - BBC News
Also on Telegraph
Microsoft deletes 'teen girl' AI after it became a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours
(They might think you ought to have sub, but "private mode" )

It's not "learning". It's just a chatbot and a database that was stupidly set to automatically update from random people on the Internet. How's that going to go well?

Amazon's Echo (I forget name, Alexis?), Apple's Siri and MS Cortana etc are NOT "AI". Nor is that annoying voice script that has replaced call centre people on <insert service you pay for and need support> They are just badly done voice recognition systems, connected to poorly implemented "expert systems" (which have never yet been AI) accessing databases.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Also
Microsoft put a teen girl chatbot on Twitter. The results will not surprise you one bit
and as ever the El Reg Commentards ...
Microsoft put a teen girl chatbot on Twitter. The results will not surprise you one bit • The Register Forums

 

[Ursa major]

If only they had thought to let "it practice on" -- i.e. build its database from the content of -- the Chrons.

(Note that I see this as only being good for the chatbot, not the Chrons.)

 

[Ray McCarthy]

If only they had thought to let "it practice on"

They don't even need to do that. feeding the database a site scrape and a load of decent books would work better. I suspect the programmers haven't much of a clue (we know too that only about 10% are any good, also most are young white males) and the managers deciding to deploy the program understand less.

Look at how MS has messed up Office (ribbon) since 2003, Windows since 2004 (Vista - Win7 is just bug fix of vista, Win 8.x, Win 10, Win Tiles on desktop), messed up Skype since getting it. Destroyed 3 phone platforms (their own, Danger/Sidekick and Nokia's phone division, they spent $1.5 Billion to get Nokia to leave the market ... Nokia laughing all the way to the bank. They got no IP or brand! They closed all the Nokia factories and laid off most of the Nokia Phone division staff. Nokia Networks going fine). Plan B seems to be Linux! They now have released two Linux Distros (one is for cloud switches) and shortly MS SQL on Linux. The Anti-Linux IP division is disbanded and the lawyer has left MS.

Do they actually know what they are doing any longer? The Win 10 UWP endangers desktop Win10 support and sales, to support a now nearly non-existent phone platform.

Also see
Microsoft introduces yet another Skype for Windows 10 • The Register Forums

 

[Foxbat]

What bothers me is how out of touch with reality the people at Microsoft have become. They effectively gave users a fly to pull the wings off. It was always going to end this way.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Clueless

Microsoft’s racist chatbot returns with drug-smoking Twitter meltdown

Don't they get it? This CAN'T work, unless it's like a 1980s chatbot with a purely human curated database. It seems IBM's Watson is a bit of a fraud as the database is human curated. It can't actually "learn" from the internet. It's a database with a cleverly done search engine.

 

[Ray McCarthy]

Also
Microsoft's bigoted teen bot flirts with illegali-Tay in brief comeback

from comments

Re: Passes the Turing test?
Sadly, yes. It's getting harder to tell which is the artificial intelligence, but nothing tastes quite as bad as real stupidity.

 

[WaylanderToo]

Also on Telegraph
Microsoft deletes 'teen girl' AI after it became a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours.

probably says a lot about me - but I thought the headline was just hilarious