What We Learned Thanks To Tay

Microsoft’s bot Tay has already been shut down due to concerns about the inability to recognize when it’s making offensive and racist comments. This is what the bot had a chance to learn from people (real people who at least should understand what they do) it interacted with.

Here are some examples:

After the story, I’m worried for two reasons. Or even three:

1. Many people believe that there was no Holocaust; that one race is better than the other, etc. And there are many such people around the world. In some cases this is lack of knowledge (it’s hard to expect from anyone who didn’t attend to history lessons that (s)he will understand what happened between 1939 and 1945), in other there’s just ignorance, but the worst thing is that in some cases some people are acting with premeditation using the situation to achieve their goals.
2. Many people just tried to troll Tay and for them, there is nothing wrong with doing racist jokes and negating Holocaust. For them is pure fun.
3. Last but not least – the future. Let’s face the fact that A.I. will be only more popular in next years and decades. How we use it or rather if we use it for the good of humanity or not, it’s only in people hands. Unfortunately also in the hands of the ones from both above groups. It’s not optimistic information.

There is no peace around the world. We, who lives in Europe are mostly interested in events in our continent. Unfortunately not many people see what is happening even in Turkey, which part of them is in Europe. Only a few sees how many people dies in the world to recall only Syria. Then, after we complain about the safety, we complain that it’s not safe to travel to European capitals, that it’s not safe even to go for summer holidays.

That’s all truth (I mean that it’s not safe due to terrorist’s attacks). But maybe first, let’s find out what is going on on the computers of our relatives and friends. I can’t believe that all these people who fed Tay with so many evilness live on one island.

This story is also warning for all parents. Your child may learn from The Internet the same what Tay learned in 24 hours. It’s enough that you won’t care what your child is doing and with whom is talking.

The case of Tay it’s the perfect example how easy it’s to turn The Internet into a sea of hate. I can’t imagine the life without internet already; I’m grateful every day that we have such a great possibility to learn and work without even leaving our houses. And it looks that we focused so much on personal development, business development, technology development but we forgot about the absolute basics. And I’m also pessimistic if the Tay case taught us anything. I’m afraid not.