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Comment by Cartwright2 | Hacker News Reader

> I'd give it a personality and a set of values and a rudimentary understanding of how the world works.

I don't think you have any idea how complicated such a task would be.

I do have an idea. I first got involved in AI in the early 1980s, and worked on it on-and-off (mostly on) well into the 1990s. Some of the non-AI stuff I did back then is now, for reasons I can't quote fathom, classified as AI.

A certain amount of common-sense, and basic political knowledge, should have been included in the Tay. I don't think there's any way of avoiding it. I'm skeptical of general application of the recent "free lunch" approach to AI, and for higher-level AI prefer Doug Lenat's approach with Cyc.

Alternatively, if they wanted to avoid the effort of doing that, they could have just put up a souped-up Eliza variant. That wouldn't have impressed many people, but neither did Tay, and it wouldn't have offended anyone.

If you really are experienced as you say you are in AI, you wouldn't talk about these things as if they were easy to implement. I won't assume things but I can say I'm probably not so less experienced than yourself, and I know basically everything in this field belongs to "easier said than done" category. Most researchers just run experiments in closed environments just like you said and that's what makes them useless and out of touch with reality. For this reason I actually applaud MS guys for having the guts to do this in public. It's much better than them coming out with some lame, controlled environment "AI" which does exactly what its creators intended. It's not a "failure". It's a learning process. It's not like this chatbot went and killed anyone. Everyone knew it was a robot when they were engaging with it, which is not so different from watching a standup comedian making a racist joke on stage.

I never implied it was easy to implement. I also said I was skeptical of the recent "free lunch" approach to AI.

It was a failure. It didn't understand the remarks it was making, unlike a real Holocaust denier, a 4chan user, or a stand-up comic whose joke just fell flat.

Kids pick up words from adults. They too don't completely understand the words they use when they first start picking up and using new vocabulary but the usage tend to get calibrated based on social feedback.

Here's a start.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_controversia...

Not a neural-net cure all, for sure. But took me precisely ten seconds to find and would've prevented this whole situation.

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