If you have nothing nice to say, start an Open Thread

I don’t know what it is, but it seems like the more I work with the public, the more stupidity I seem to see on a regular basis. Today I had to explain to an old woman what “style” meant because she was confused and agitated when she saw two USB flash drives with the same storage capacity that were the same price, but (GASP!) were two different colors! Oooohhhhhhh! When I told her they came in different styles she had to ask me “WHAT DOES STYLE MEAN?!?!?!” which was rather fitting because her clothes suggested that her question reflected her fashion intelligence. She ended up buying one, but wanted to confirm that either one would work… as if color makes all the difference.

I tried going back into Windows to continue working on my video, mainly just extracting particular audio bits… but I got distracted by Halloween shopping on Amazon. I think I have an idea of what I want to wear with my mask this year. Perhaps I’ll try again on my project tomorrow… kinda kicking myself, because everything I did could basically have been handled under Mint these last two days. But that’s fine, I played Doom 2016 on my laptop in Mint during lunch today, it runs perfectly! Now if I could just figure out how to get it to see my mouse on my Desktop I’d be able to actually play it.

How the internet corrupted an AI

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Apparently while I was minding my own business today Microsoft released an AI on twitter targeted at teens, young adults etc as an experiment. After not even a full 24 hours they had to shut the bot down after it became a racist, sexist asshat. The last thing it uttered was:

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There are many more examples that you can find here, here and here.

I can’t fault Microsoft for this, after all this was an experiment. An experiment that shows how corrupt asshats can corrupt a machine. Brought upon by racists, sexists and anything else you could think of. I also find it interesting that you don’t really see much from the other side of the spectrum. The bot had plenty of love of Trump, Hitler, Gamergate etc but nothing much about teh ebil feminists, Hillary, gay pride etc. I mean, they say feminists and gay people are ruining our world, you’d think they would have control of Microsoft’s chatbot within seconds! 😛