03.25.16

Forget About Tay: Microsoft Has Serious Issues, Including Existential Ones

Posted in Microsoft, Vista 10, Windows at 11:30 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Insults which earn attention and cannot be blamed (no liability) on the attention seeker

A Donald Trump-like media strategy

Summary: The media keeps obsessing over some apparent fluke which gives Microsoft press iota/attention it wouldn’t get otherwise, but the real news is buried deeper inside the papers

WHILE the media is obsessed with a Microsoft fluke which some of our readers interpret as a clever Microsoft publicity stunt (attracting media attention) [1-3] there are much bigger things going on, other than the recent Microsoft layoffs. One reader, for instance, told us (or made claims) about Microsoft’s role in F-35 failures [4] which the media compares to BSoD, some point out that Yahoo is under attack again [5], and there is even news about Vista 10 being a total disaster [6] that’s now being compared to Vista [7] (not by us but by the British media). Don’t be misled by what’s known as the “news cycle”. There’s a lot going on at Microsoft right now that’s a lot worse than some bot (nonhuman) called “Tay”.

As one reader of ours who specialised in marketing put it, the fluke is “a win win in terms of publicity [...] publicity about making a big deal about this bot in the first place, and then after the obvious happens [...] marketing 101 [...] It’s the Trump method as well [...] if this was an “experiment” it would have more likely have been done in the way I described [...] hence why I am incredulous towards the idea that Microsoft was just naive [...] wouldn’t it be more useful to introduce this bot in an unknowing public environment to see how it interacted without interference or bias? [...] if they wanted to avoid this, they would have not advertised what this bot is in the first place, then nobody would know what it did and assume it’s just another twitter user [...] I have no doubt that some of these are done in ignorance on the company’s/organization’s part, but this one, seems too obvious [...] note that I have no proof that Microsoft knew this was going to happen, this is just an opinion based on recent trends [...] that said, it is incredulous that an supposedly-Internet-savvy company like Microsoft wouldn’t know this would happen, especially consider the amount of incidents in the past, like the Coca-Cola one where Gawker caused their campaign-bot to quote Mein Kempf [...] how do you sexually harass something that is incapable of perceiving anything, has no feelings or self-awareness, and oh yeah ISN’T ALIVE and is technology? [...] but don’t worry, money-hemorrhaging Microsoft, laying off employees and killing products and divisions, still can assign a team to address this “issue” [...] I bet those fired employees can sleep easy now [...] I think they knew this was going to happen [...] a PR stunt, so they can promote the “dangers” of AI harassment or some other nonsense [...] not that long ago there was an article about Cortana “harassment” (weird questions being asked etc) and how MS actually set up a research team to deal with the “issue” of AI “harassment” [..] so by playing the unknowing victim here, MS can promote this agenda and gain regressive-left points [...] I hypothesize that MS in addition to becoming a patent troll/fog computing company is also appealing more to the regressive left and using more PC [political correctness] tactics.”

MinceR, responding to the above, said that “playing the victim is popular among crybullies [...] PR experiment [...] Microsoft is not a tech company or a science company.” █

Related/contextual Microsoft items from the news:

1. Microsoft is deleting its AI chatbot’s incredibly racist tweets

   In one highly publicised tweet, which has since been deleted, Tay said: “bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we’ve got.” In another, responding to a question, the program said, “Ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism.”

2. Microsoft’s Lovable Teen Chatbot Turned Racist Troll Proves How Badly Silicon Valley Needs Diversity

   Tay, programmed as a 19 year old, was created as a machine learning project meant interact with peers between 18 and 24 years old. Users can play games with her, trade pictures, tell stories, and ping her for late-night chats. That last activity went awry Thursday when the chatbot began regurgitating inappropriate messages that skewed anti-semitic, used the n-word, and condemned feminism.

3. Microsoft deletes ‘teen girl’ AI after it became a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours

   A day after Microsoft introduced an innocent Artificial Intelligence chat robot to Twitter it has had to delete it after it transformed into an evil Hitler-loving, incestual sex-promoting, ‘Bush did 9/11′-proclaiming robot.

   Developers at Microsoft created ‘Tay’, an AI modelled to speak ‘like a teen girl’, in order to improve the customer service on their voice recognition software. They marketed her as ‘The AI with zero chill’ – and that she certainly is.

4. Dodgy software will bork America’s F-35 fighters until at least 2019 [Ed: this one says, “make the ground subsystem compliant to Microsoft Windows 7″]

   In another exercise, conducted by the Marine Corps in May 2015, the exercise was delayed because file formatting problems meant target information couldn’t be uploaded to the aircraft. The US Air Force had similar problems, aborting a test after none of the aircraft could fly due to startup problems requiring software and hardware shutdowns and restarts.

5. Hedge Fund To Launch Proxy Fight To Remove Yahoo’s Entire Board: Report [Ed: recall what Microsoft did]

   Activist hedge fund Starboard Value LP, which is leading an investor revolt against Yahoo Inc’s management team, is seeking to remove the entire board of the struggling Internet company, the Wall Street Journal reported.

6. Creaking Surrey distie Northamber: Windows 10 ate my hamster

   AIM-listed tech distie Northamber’s sales are again withering on the vine, with blame falling on Microsoft’s Windows 10 and pesky human beings who are failing to buy more computers.

   Sequestered in an industrial estate in deepest Surrey, Northamber has made a living from selling IT for the past 35 years but might just have seen its best days – peaking at £299m in the early noughties.

7. Mud sticks: Microsoft, Windows 10 and reputational damage [Ed: comparing Vista to Vista 10]

   So, Windows 10 isn’t the saviour of the PC industry after all – and is beginning to look more like a Windows Vista than a Windows XP.

   PC growth predictions have been revised down by IDC. A range of companies including HP Ink and Northamber blame Windows 10 for flagging sales.

   “We have not yet seen the anticipated Win10 stimulation of demand that we would hope for,” HP Ink’s CEO Dion Weisler told analysts in January.

   Windows Vista drove Microsoft’s marketing team to despair, because when they blind tested it on users around 18 months after launch (on hardware capable of running Vista well), the users liked what they saw. They couldn’t reconcile the positive experience of using Vista with Vista’s noxious reputation. This was the Mojave Experiment, unfairly derided at the time. The lesson from Mojave was that a reputation sticks.

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