Good Bot, Bad Bot | Part IV: Tay

Endless Thread

WBUR

Reddit, Technology

4.2 • 2.7K Ratings

🗓️ 2 December 2022

⏱️ 30 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Next up in our bots series, we bring you a cautionary tale about Tay, a Microsoft chatbot that has lived on in infamy. Tay was originially modeled to be the bot-girl-next-door. But after only sixteen hours on Twitter, Tay was shut down.

In this episode of Good Bot, Bad Bot, we uncover who gets a say in what we build, how developers build it, and who is to blame when things take a dark turn.

****** Credits: This episode was written and produced by Quincy Walters and Ben Brock Johnson. Mixing and sound design by Paul Vaitkus. Ben Brock Johnson and Quincy Walters are the co-hosts.

Transcript

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1:00.0	WBWR podcasts. Boston.
1:06.0	For me, as a Black developer, when I look at stuff like this, I never blame the AI. It's never the AI's fault. It's just an algorithm that's just falling instructions. That's all it's doing. It's always a reflection of society.
1:22.0	TAY is like a social technical system, a combination of code, but also interaction with people and groups. And the harm that TAY did was not anticipated by the creators.
1:37.0	It was a really interesting project when it first came out.
1:40.0	I believe that at least in Pacific time, it sort of happened overnight.
1:46.0	Hello world. Can I just say I'm stoked to meet you? Humans are super cool.
1:53.0	I'm Ben Brock Johnson. I'm Quincy Walters, and you're listening to Endless Thread.
1:58.0	We're coming to you from Boston's NPR station WBWR, and we're bringing you the latest episode of our BOTS series, GoodBot BadBot.
2:07.0	Today, the cautionary tale of a chatbot designed to be friendly and fun, and when released into the American online landscape, became far from it.
2:17.0	And how that story can and should be a reminder of what we build, how we build it, and who's to blame when it gets ugly.
2:32.0	Quincy, did you know about TAY before we started talking about TAY?
2:35.0	Not really. I think at the time it came out, I was a production intern at NPR, and off of the top of my head, I think we were dealing with things like the Trump rally in Chicago around the time.
2:50.0	Some kind of presidential primary and terrorist attack in Brussels or something like that.
2:57.0	Well, the first of those things, I think, ends up being kind of relevant here.
	...

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