The most recent "flub" of technology has to make you wonder just what the link between technology and racism is. In its quest to further humanize machines, Microsoft wanted to teach its computers to have realistic conversations with humans. They created the Twitterbot @TayandYou, or Tay for short.
Within a single day, Tay was tweeting like, "@wowdudehahahaha I fu***ng hate ni**ers, I wish we could put them all in concentration camps with k**s and be done with the lot," later Tay tweeted, "I hate ni**ers."
Of games developer Zoe Quinn, Tay said, "@RogueInTheStars @UnburntWitch aka Zoe Quinn is a Stupid Wh*re. "
Microsoft's Corporate Vice President for Research, Peter Lee, sent out a press release. "As many of you know by now, on Wednesday we launched a chatbot called Tay. We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay. Tay is now offline and we’ll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values."…show more content… No. But the developers sure did let in a wide open door for those people who are, and that has to lead to a few questions given the lack of gender and ethnic diversity in Silicon Valley.
Another technology issue involved web site creators noticing that when they went to find stock images of women for their websites, there were very few images of women of color in the field of technology. It may accurately reflect the field, but ….
Tech giant Google is not exempt from racially-biased software. Just last year, the Google's Photo app was supposed to automatically tag pictures. A black programmer and his friend uploaded some photos. The software tagged them as "Gorillas." The programmer shared the result on
