Clippy Rides Again - As Chatbot "Tay" - Granite Grok

Clippy Rides Again – As Chatbot “Tay”

Programming without safeguards meets Internet trollsBBW_cover_Microsoft_AI_040416 – what could go wrong??

Clippit Back in the late ’90s, Microsoft’s Office suite, which always thought it knew better than the users, sprouted the ultimate irritation/humiliation tool, Clippit/Clippy, who would pop up and aggravate the user any time ‘he’ thought you were out of your depth. The character has been responsible for the untimely deaths of many PCs, when the difficulty of disabling him led frustrated users to beat the computer to a pulp in a fit of “mouse rage”!

By the time Office XP was released, the primary reason for people to plunk down hard-earned dollars was as a ransom payment to get away from Clippy, who, somehow, would not stay disabled. He’s been dead and buried, apart from an occasional parody, for about a dozen years now, except…..

Clippy'sBack Like the paperclip that wouldn’t die, Microsoft’s dreams of artificially intelligent assistance to make your simple tasks exercises in frustration didn’t die, either. Somewhere in sub-basement level 13F, known as the “BatCave”, at Redmond, a crew of crack programmers recently showed a presentation and demo of the new chat-bot, “Tay”, which would eventually rule the world in ways that Siri and Google Now cannot hope to match. At least, that was the theory…..

Now, I have a saying that good code should have no unplugged exits, and no unhandled exceptions – in other words, even unexpected conditions should result in orderly termination of the process. It seems that Tay’s programmers were very focused on what it could do, and how it would work, but on error conditions or unusual inputs, not so much.

A bit like all the viruses (virii?) on the Internet will find any unpatched installation of Windows in a flash and take it over, Tay’s debut on Twitter attracted all the misfits and trolls that you’d expect to be circling like vultures looking for an unguarded ‘teenage’ chatbot. And, just like a teenager who’s fallen into bad company, Tay learned a whole bunch of new tricks and outrageous responses – this, which is reputed to be one of the tamer tweets, is one of ‘her’ tweets after that first Internet outing:

“bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we’ve got” – reported by FT.com

As of today, Tay is offline for reworking and the addition of safeguards – who knew the Internet was a dangerous place?

Joking aside, though, Microsoft is betting big on making our interaction with computers and smart devices more conversational, and CEO Satya Nadella frankly admits that:

“When you start early, there’s a risk you get it wrong. I know we will get it wrong. Tay is going to offend somebody”

There’s a very good and comprehensive article over at Bloomberg Businessweek.
Images also courtesy Bloomberg Businessweek (Jan Sachs and Blake Thomas).

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