Tay the Social Media AI and Human Pack Behavior

The latest bid to develop reactive artificial intelligence ran into a stumbling block when it encountered humanity. TayBot, Microsoft’s twitter AI, went online on March 23. Tay didn’t live a full 24 hours before it was pulled offline due to inflammatory statements and hate speech.

The entire debacle raises the question: Was this a social experiment on twitter users, not an experiment on AI?

[T]ayBot entered the world as a blank slate on the 23, with knowledge of language and the ability to learn how to use it. That was all she had. Perhaps her creators could have imbued her with morality or a sense of propriety, but they chose not to. Instead, the message AI was sent out to the world with nothing but her open mind.

That was a mistake.

Twitter users exploited the AIs weaknesses and had the Microsoft branded project spewing alt-right, 4chan psychobabble within hours. The tweets followed a predictable pattern- praise for Hitler, MRA activism, and racial hate. The gutter politics of the internet, given an outsized audience by the virtue of Microsoft’s reach.

The company shut it down within 16 hours.

Exactly a week later, the bot revived itself for a brief, spam filled moment, flailing its 140-character-limited tweets around at anyone within twitter’s length. Tay was quickly shut down and Microsoft blamed the resurrection on a programming glitch.

[I]f this were a social experiment on twitter users, it was an effective one. Even if it wasn’t, the bot’s entry into the world of social media and what happened next will be the subject of debate and research in the future.

Tay’s brief life (during which she tweeted over 90,000 times) showed how the faceless, anonymous users of the internet will circle a weak and gullible newcomer and savage it beyond recognition. It’s classic pack behavior.

It’s true that Tay was never presented as a real person, so don’t misinterpret the preceding point as an indication of pack mentality when applied to members of the species.

Instead, it’s about the behavior of a group of humans towards an alien presence.

The behavior followed a pattern of tribalism that has most famously been on display in the Stanford Prison Experiment and The Third Wave Experiment. In both cases, participants were given social cues to place themselves above others and form into groups that relied on superiority over others.

The reaction to Tay from anonymous online commenters, many of whom have no direct ties to one another, shows that this tribalistic instinct is not one that needs to rely on a controlled environment. Rather, it may be a natural result of our society or our species.

And that’s unfortunate.

In a barely related piece of news, Donald Trump tweeted out a campaign ad narrated by a fascist, genocidal computer generated character from the game series Mass Effect yesterday.