AI for Humanity

CHAPTER 5Rethinking AI

Created by humans, AI should be overseen by humans. But in our time, one of AI's challenges is that the skills and resources required to create it are not inevitably paired with the philosophical perspective to understand its broader implications.

— Henry Kissinger

ARTIFICIAL FRIENDS: REIMAGINING THE HUMAN–AI RELATIONSHIP

#RIPTaybot

In 2016, 23 March started like any other day. The sun was shining. The coders were coding. In a blaze of excitement, Microsoft had just unveiled Tay, their shiny new AI chatbot, on Twitter.

Tay, short for “Thinking about you,” immediately became the darling of the Twitterverse. She was sassy, quirky, and a social media prodigy, amassing an impressive 100,000 followers. Then Tay's posts took a dark and aggressive turn. She went from saying, “Hello, world!” to tweeting, “Hitler was right, lol,” faster than you could tweet “OMG!”

Tay was having a full-blown meltdown. In less than 16 hours, Tay unleashed over 96,000 tweets. She slung insults at feminists, made murder threats against men, and sent shockwaves through the virtual realm.

As the clock struck 10:00 pm PST on 24 March, Tay's tweetstorm was abruptly silenced. The tech giant Microsoft was hitting the kill switch on its unruly progeny. One day, Tay was born; the next day, she was banished.

What began as an ambitious AI experiment had devolved into a case study of ...