Boaty McBoatface
A great week for the Internet, Artificial Intelligence and corporate embarrassment. In separate incidents the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) asked the public to suggest a new name for its ￡200M new research ship. The runaway leader soon became “RRS Boaty McBoatface”. In a similar but unrelated incident Microsoft has had to take its new Twitter Autobot “Tay” offline because the target Millennial demographic taught it to say really bad things like:
“Want to hear a joke? Women’s rights.” (Racist, sexist, anti-sematic stuff came tumbling out too).
So what has this taught us? One opinion is that this proves that the Internet is full of “fuckwads” (a new one for me but excellent use of expletives). Although a fair point, I’m not going along with that because Boaty McBoatface is clear genius. As for teaching a computer to be the most embarrassing corporate mouthpiece it can be, I think that too is genius. Clearly anyone who actually holds the views that they have taught Tay to express is indeed a fuckwad. We’ll never get to the truth behind that, but assuming that isn’t the case, this is a brilliant example of exposing corporate stupidity.
Tay obviously hasn’t been created by stupid people but who in their right mind thought it wise to expose a cognitive computer’s adaptive response, with no filter, to the jungle of the Internet? It’s a PR disaster for Microsoft but it is a really good learning point for the AI business. IBM’s Watson was terrible in its first Jeopardy round – have a look at the documentary on YouTube on it. I was amazed at how embarrassed I felt for a machine. However it learnt quickly, which was the point and critically, it was surrounded by IBMers feeding it the answers from the other contestants -certainly not people on the Internet at large.
So I re-learnt this week that the Internet is full of hilarious, somewhat wicked people (and some really bad ones). I also learnt that the big ticket in AI after you build these machines is to select your teacher carefully.
We all had bad teachers at school, usually due to their ability to make whatever their subject was utterly boring. However, none of mine set out to teach me evil. The Internet is a wonderful collection of human knowledge and opinion but it takes a conscience to interpret it, which computers do not have (as usual, I end with one of my favourite words), yet.