Tough Questions

Objectifying women to promote sales is an age old technique. But is it right to blame a company for showing what (many) people obviously want to see? Is it even fair to expect a company to follow a code of morality that many of us want but is not even close to reality?

Microsoft, a company I don’t exactly like, is the trigger for these questions. At the 2016 Game Developers Conference, writes TC Sottek:
“Attendees of Microsoft's GDC party were greeted by women dancing on platforms — a choice made not by the venue but by Microsoft.”
(In case you’re wondering, this wasn’t a Windows or Office launch! It was a forum to show the latest from Microsoft’s video/computer games division. Such games appeal to a mostly male audience, hence…).

Many of us can agree with Sottek’s lament:
“Conferences like CES and E3 were notorious for many years for using "booth babes" to promote their brands and products by baiting the male gaze.”
But is Microsoft (or any other gaming company) to blame for that? Aren’t they just giving the public what they want? Sure, we might want companies to behave more “responsibly” (whatever that means), but c’mon, when was the last time that a company influenced your morals or values by their actions in a positive way?

On the bad publicity front, the week got even worse for Microsoft. Here is what happened:
“Microsoft unveiled Tay — a Twitter bot that the company described as an experiment in "conversational understanding." The more you chat with Tay, said Microsoft, the smarter it gets, learning to engage people through "casual and playful conversation."”
But within less than 24 hours of launch:
“Pretty soon after Tay launched, people starting tweeting the bot with all sorts of misogynistic, racist, and Donald Trumpist remarks. And Tay — being essentially a robot parrot with an internet connection — started repeating these sentiments back to users, proving correct that old programming adage: flaming garbage pile in, flaming garbage pile out.”
Or as one guy tweeted:
“"Tay" went from "humans are super cool" to full nazi in <24 hrs.="" o:p="">
But doesn’t this raise certain deeper questions:
“It's a joke, obviously, but there are serious questions to answer, like how are we going to teach AI using public data without incorporating the worst traits of humanity?”

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Student of the Year

Image
As a toddler, my daughter loved Alia Bhatt’s songs, esp. the ones from Student of the Year . (That movie did have many good songs and well-choreographed dances). Fast forward to present day, when she is 12 yo. She rarely watches Hindi movies now, but one of the few ones she likes of late, Raja aur Rani ki Prem Kahani has, yes, Alia Bhatt.   If I had any hopes that there was anything to be read in the name of her toddler-time favorite ( Student of the Year ), they have been dashed. Our conversations come exam time are perfectly captured by this photo and its caption: In fact, the pic below captures how she and I look at her answer sheets – me intently, she with an expression of “It’s over, so why are you even looking at it?”   Of late, we pull her leg and tell her that she isn’t showing any signs of academic prowess, she’d better find a rich guy to marry. Some time later, she showed us this meme on the Internet: “Me No Study, Me No Care Me Go Marry Millionaire If He Die
Read more

Animal Senses #7: Touch and Remote Touch

Instinctively, we think touch is based on contact. Not entirely true, explains Ed Yong in Immense World – there’s a more important aspect than contact: “These incredible feats are possible through movement. If you rest a fingertip upon a surface, you can get only a limited idea of its features. But as soon you’re allowed to move, everything changes. Hardness becomes apparent with a press. Textures resolve at a stroke.” As you run your fingers over a surface, they hit the tiny peaks and troughs and set off vibrations in the mechanoreceptors at their tips.   At the tip of its snout, the star-nosed mole has many pairs of hairless appendages. It uses them to touch things around itself. Alive or dead? Food or ignore? It does these movements at an insane speed. In the time it takes to blink our eyes, the star-nosed mole can probe, identify and swallow its food. “Light may be the fastest thing in the universe, but light sensors have their limits, and the star-nosed mole’s sense of
Read more

The Retort of the "Luxury Person"

Image
Coming up with biting and witty retorts. It’s something we dream of, but rarely manage to pull off. Worse, the more we stew over the offending remark, the more likely we are to come up with that dream retort, as Calvin ruefully points out: During our last holiday at the Taj Resort, seeing my wife carrying towels to our poolside chairs, one of the kids there mistook her for a member of the staff and asked for a towel. When my wife narrated this to us, I did not imagine that my 8 yo daughter would come up with her own retort. But a day later, my daughter recapped the incident, an incident that didn’t even involve her in the first place , and said, “You know what I’d have told that kid who asked for the towel?”. And without waiting for an answer, she told us anyway: “I don’t work here. I too am a luxury person who is living at this resort. Go get your own towel.” We were highly amused by the phrase she had coined: “luxury person”. It certainly captures the kind of holid
Read more