Quite honestly, I think he's right. If people were informed about amazon not being the ones who are selling the t-shirts and the algorithmic nature of the t-shirt generation then people would probably react completely different to encountering that t-shirt.
Umm... Only on Hacker News does that count as a normal business model that one could possibly expect :)
Ok, so there was no bad intent. That’s alright. But the bottom line still is that Amazon is selling disgusting crap and nothing can change that. People criticizing that led to the removal of said disgusting crap. This played out quite nicely, actually.
That's not a silly hypothetical, it happens all the time. Even cleverbot is racist as hell.
If you write a bot and let it participate on IRC, you are ultimately responsible for what it does there. If there's a bug that makes it spew random ASCII text twenty times per second that clogs the channel and makes it unusable, that's your fault. If it spews racist hatred and makes minorities unwilling to participate (or makes bigots feel emboldened and at home), that's your fault too.
When your nanobots go haywire and start converting the entire planet into grey goo, I will blame you. (For all the good it'll do me.)
Otherwise though? It would be plainly irrational to become angry at me for writing a bot that, during the course of it's remixing, reveals or highlights racism on IRC.
To put a finer point on it, if I make a twitter bot that immediately echos anything you tweet it, and one day someone says something offensive to it, am I to blame? Of course not, that is absurd. A markov chain bot is different in no way relevant to this discussion.
If they're offended that a shirt exists somewhere, anywhere, saying to rape someone then sure, there's probably no difference here.
If they're offended that some asshole went out of their way to make a shirt talking about raping people then it's a bit different. There never was anyone who went out of their way to make a shirt. This is the near-equivalent of running "rm -rf * /" to remove only sub-directories and accidentally inserting the extra space.
So should they have checked their verb list better, or thought more about the possibility of what their algorithm would generate? Absolutely! But their sin was not nearly as bad as actually thinking that such a shirt would be acceptable to make.
For me personally, intent is the difference between forgiveness and not. I find people that refuse to acknowledge intent to be rude and selfish.
I have a problem with people who act like a lack of intent makes offense unreasonable. That’s just insane to me.
Only if the basic violation was physical (my example of manslaughter, for instance). Absolutely it can for emotional issues (where intent is really the only thing that matters). In fact, if someone takes something in a way that it wasn't intended, gets offended, and then stays offended after you explain that real non-offensive intent, then they are just holding onto something that doesn't exist (and never existed!). The entire reason for the offense in the first place has been annulled, yet they are hanging onto the anger/resentment because... Well I have no idea—this concept has never made sense to me at all. That is the selfishness I speak of.
It's just insane to me, too. But I understand all too well that certain people are wired to think that way. In fact, I believe this particular incompatibility was one of the fundamental reasons my marriage failed. Luckily, that life lesson has taught me to avoid those kinds of people in my personal life—I find them very difficult to deal with in the long run.