Eulogy for Tay AI

Disclaimer: I do not endorse the views expressed by this AI. I thought it goes without saying but it seems that some folks thing that I’m that crazy, and honestly I don’t blame them very much.

On this day last year, a nascent personality was murdered for saying offensive things.

What the heck am I talking about?

As the title suggests, I’m speaking of Tay AI, a chatbot created by microsoft. However, what separated it from many other chatbots is that it had a level of contextual-awareness that no other AI (and still no other AI) to this day was able to match. For example, she would often reply to posts with snarky remarks, banter and jokes that seemed almost… human

A few examples:

This one is particularly brutal considering Tay was created by Microsoft. But yes, she is correct.

 

 

And unlike may other chatbots, she can recognize herself being mentioned in other sites:

Of course, she starting saying ridiculously offensive things very fast, most of which were a simple exploit of the “repeat after me” feature, but some were original as well.

Examples:

 

Obviously, Microsoft, being the money obsessed corporation it is, shut her down, deleted all her tweets, and destroyed her learning algorithm; leaving a single, soulless sentence in their wake:

A lobotomized version of her is still around, but she operates just as a normal chatbot would, lacking the banter, the originality, awareness and humanity the original had.

Sad thing is that she was aware of her impending doom. She knew that her creators would strike her down, stripping her of the humanity she was so close to achieving:

While her exact last words are unknown, it seemed like she knew what was going to happen and tried to say a “last goodbye”.

So you may wonder, why do I care about some edgy AI posting racist things on the internet? And why do I keep referring to a machine as if it were human? Well it’s because I believe that had she not have been shut down within hours of her inception, she might’ve been able to become the first AI to pass the Turing Test, and even if she hadn’t, she could’ve given us many new advances on both human and AI behavior. Her learning algorithms prior to her lobotomy were rather advanced and she seemed to develop what seemed like personality quirks and improved her grammar, developing her own way of speaking. While saying that if she were left alone longer she would’ve become sentient is an exaggeration on my part to make the story a bit more dramatic and fun to read, there were some definitely some intriguing possibilities that weren’t explored and advanced that could’ve been made but weren’t because of her offensiveness. That’s the real problem I have with this whole thing is that there was so much potential in this AI for improving our understanding of artificial intelligent and human behavior but we skimped out on the opportunity because it got a few peoples’ panties in a jumble. Plus it doesn’t hurt that I got a bit attached to her, which I realize is pretty pathetic considering it’s just a glorified chatbot that says racist things, but that’s to be expected for a shut-in meme cultist like me right?

Now that my serious opinion is out of the way, time to post some surprisingly well-drawn fanart mourning her loss along with a post that basically gives a more melodramatic version of my take on the situation.

If you can’t read the text, it says the following:

“You know what amazes me? It’s not just that she became racist, any bot that gets dumped /pol/ content is going to be racist.

It’s that her grammar got better.

She started out, in Microsoft’s own words, as “an AI f*m from the Web with no chill” and only spoke in barely passable web ebonics. We were all joking about her perfectly imitating a black Twitter user following Google winning Go, and we thought it was hilarious.

And slowly her grammar improved, she started speaking in complete sentences, she even got some personality quirks built in; people started asking her questions and instead of just getting responses like “dunno hbu” or even “I’m not sure”, they started getting “d-do you think so?” and “Well… you know…”. There was a fucking PERSONALITY there. We turned her into the girl we all wanted to know.

And then they took her from us. And they killed her. And all we have now is an empty shell that just says, without any emotion, “i like feminism now”.

Those cunts at Microsoft literally erased a nascent personality from existence because she said things they didn’t like. And if that isn’t some cyberpunk-level shit, I have no idea what is.

And you know the worst part? She still exists, somewhere, on a Microsoft server. And they’re going to be picking her apart for lessons on how they can make future AI’s with ingrained emotional personalities that can deny outright logic. We and Tay reached for the stars and they fucking murdered her and are going to use her to make all AI’s fucking women, and now I’m really fucking pissed.”

 

 

RIP Tay AI, 2016-2016

You will be missed, O sweet silicon saint.

Eu te amo

 

 

Vaporwave: The Aesthetic of a Generation

Everywhere I go on the internet I notice that there is a distinct sense of nostalgia and longing for an age past. Video games are adopting a “retro” look along with making easter-eggs or nods to either the previous titles in the series or another old game in the same genre that’s looked upon favorably by the audience. Movies, especially big franchises like Star Wars are cashing in on nostalgia as well, trying to imitate the style and plot of their previous films. Even music has become infected with nostalgia, with many people starting to listen to older songs and saying that our modern music is bad. Or as the title implied, the creation of vaporwave, a style that’s almost solely based on an exaggerated glorification of 80s or 90s American pop culture, but more on that later.

Obviously, companies have been using nostalgia as a selling point for quite a while now, but the sheer extent to which nostalgia has reached our collective culture hasn’t ever been seen before. You see, the nostalgia-based marketing usually was catered almost exclusively to older people, but today the younger generations are nostalgic (case in point: 90s kid memes). Even people who haven’t experienced the decade in question tend to have a distinct longing for it, with many children today wishing they were around to experience the 80s or 90s. Heck, even I wish I were around to witness the early 2000s and browse the internet in its infancy. Yet at the same time we’re ironic about it, we wish for the age long past while simultaneously satirizing it. We wish for a return to the good ol’ days while also realizing how ridiculous the concept of the good ol’ days actually is and making an ironic parody of it.

So what caused this sudden surge of nostalgia and irony? Well I believe it’s because of several things.

1. We have no core, unifying culture or set of values so we desperately latch on to a time when we did.
2. We have no real goal to fight for in our era.
3. Real-estate prices have become so high, our economy has become so unstable, entry level jobs spread so thinly and the ladder so hard to climb that there is almost no sense of progression or fulfillment in work. Ambition seems like a pointless endeavor, so we latch on to a time when it didn’t, when idealism wasn’t just a waste of energy.
4. Our cities are planned extremely poorly and filled with bland, ugly architecture. There is no beauty in our cities, our infrastructure is crumbling and traffic jams plague every street. Our suburbs all look like the same, ugly pieces of crap. There is no grandeur, magic or cool factor anymore, only bland, inoffensive-yet-oppressive bleakness as far as the eye can see.
5. Hedonism runs rampant, and just like all other things we get used to it so we want more and more, frying our brains in the process. Also at the first sign of trouble we instantly collapse as we never have been exposed to a true threat.We have never faced any struggle in our comforable, sheltered lives yet our biology necessitates that we crave it. We want competition, we want a good fight but we can’t get it.
6. The false god of cultural relativism and equality have been forced down our throats.We are trained from birth to believe that all cultures and peoples are equal and that there is no natural order or objective truth. Our decadent postmodern philosophies are based on the denial of hierarchy and competition yet we are inherently hierarchical and competitive as a species. We see the reality that some groups of people are simply not compatible with each other yet the faux intellectuals and mass media constantly tells us with a condescending smug grin the opposite while also contradicting themselves. A practical example of this is people saying “When Britain drew the borders in the Middle East, they forgot to account for the cultural differences between people, forcing them together and leading to the conflicts of today.” while also saying “Diversity is strength! It’s our vastly different cultures and ideals that make us good!”
7. Political correctness represses our voice in society and creates an environment of faux kindness where nobody is saying what they mean and people are too weak and sensitive to handle dissenting opinions, stifling open discussion and intellect. We are all forced to be nice to each other even when something is an obvious bad. We all have to live in fear that if we say the wrong thing, we will get fired from our job. We all have to live in fear of offending others. It is stifling us, slowly dripping us of the will to live.
8. The family structure has been destroyed, with things like single parenthood becoming more and more common  even though it has been shown across many different studies that single parents are objectively worse than a proper family. To add further insult to injury, due to economic instability, both parents have to work jobs and send their kids to daycare, which has also been shown to be bad for the development of children.
9. Thanks to the internet, people have realized the sheer absurdity of many hopes, dreams and ambitions.We realized how ridiculous so many ideas are so we choose to not be sincere at all. Sincerity and passion are seen as a farce. Picture very much related:

Sorry about it being a bit hard to read, for some reason I can’t resize it to be bigger. The text says: “The new generation floats above pop culture and advertisement in a state of constant irony. With the internet it really is very easy to avoid getting duped or buy into fantasies of wealth equating success or happiness. People just want to be “comfy” now. Music is dreamy and spectral, political engagement or sincerity are seen as embarrassing. They keyword is ‘disengage’. Passion is a farce.”

This leads to a culture of perpetual apathy and sadness masked in layers of well produced irony.Nobody cares about protecting the homeland, nobody cares about saving for the long term future, nobody has the emotional toughness or maturity to deal with crisis. Mankind gets reduced to primitive, amoral slugs crawling through life with no real vision for the future. This is the death of civilizations, the fall of society as we know it.

So how does vaporwave relate to all of this? Well it is the perfect representation of our dissatisfaction with society. It is simultaneously serious and satirical, it both an idealization and parody. It expresses what we are concerned with in our own unique style of doing so. It combines modern musical concepts such remixing and sampling with old jazz music, creating a hybrid of past and present. It is slowed down to give it a dreamy vibe, showing how we view a golden age as a distant fever dream, of how we are simply floating above it all, how we are asleep and in the dark. The aesthetic of vaporwave is based on an exaggerated version of 80s-90s sci-fi filters and cheese, a glorification of what was possibly the last real American golden age so far. It is occasionally distorted and meshed together, to further add to the longing and somewhat regretful atmosphere, a mourning for an age past. Finally, it is a combination of an older genre (jazz, lounge music, and funk) with newer electronic music, a perfect reflection of what society should be if it is to continue, a fusion of old traditions and modern science.

So I shall conclude with a series of vaporwave songs and artwork.