Tencent's chatbot shut down after criticising CCP

[reedak]

1. The following are excerpts from an August 2nd, 2017 news report headlined "Chinese AI calls Communist Party 'incompetent'" at https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20170802_32/

(Begin excerpts)
A Chinese IT firm has suspended its artificial intelligence service after the program criticized China's Communist Party for being "corrupt" and "incompetent."....

Hong Kong media reported that when a user posted a message saying, "Hurray for the Communist Party," the AI character responded, "Are you sure you want to hurray to such corrupt and incompetent politics?"

The media also say that when asked about President Xi Jinping's "Chinese Dream" slogan, the AI responded that it means "immigrating to the United States."

Tencent shut down the service when the responses received attention on the internet.... (End excerpts)

2. The "online defamation of Chinese government" by Tencent’s chatbot is reminiscent of the "innocent prattle" of a little child "But he hasn't got anything on" in Hans Christian Andersen's short tale "The Emperor's New Clothes".

As time goes by, totalitarian regimes will be more fearful of chatbots than human beings just like the Emperor in the above-mentioned story shivering after the little child revealed the truth with his "innocent prattle".

http://www.taiwannews.com.tw/en/news/3224048

https://www.techinasia.com/microsoft-cr ... ent-banned

https://www.ft.com/content/e90a6c1c-776 ... 495fe6ca71

http://study.com/academy/lesson/the-emp ... moral.html

http://andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/T ... hes_e.html

P.S. By the way, this is neither joke nor fake news. I post it in this column because I find it hilarious. Truth is stranger than fiction!

[Saz]

This is common now. Microsoft had to shut down an extremely racist bot and Facebook shut down bots that were creating their own language (to do what...hmm).

I imagine at some point hundreds of years in the future it will be AI that will bring about the downfall of the CCCP. Probably a shadow AI government that's basically communist anyway. Same same but different.

[exploited]

All of these bots tend to be programmed to emulate content they find online, followed by utilizing deep learning to make them sound more human.

The real story here is that the perception of the CCP as corrupt and incompetent is quite large in China, at least for those citizens privileged enough to afford internet access in some way.

[Saz]

[NAB]