The Power of Twitter

Let's suppose I want to find an intelligent review of a film.

If I just put the name of the film into Google, I will get endless repetitions of the synopsis, together with details of cinemas showing the film, or places to buy/download.

In my post You don't have to be smart to search here ... but it helps (Nov 2008), I outlined one possible trick. If you put the name of the film together with a random cultural icon (my example was Lacan), you will get reviews of the film that name-drop the icon. That immediately filters out all the standard cinema listings. However, you might need to try a number of different cultural icons until you strike lucky.

A second option is to subscribe to good magazines. When I watched the film Anomalisa, I didn't immediately make the connection with Schopenhauer. The connection was made for me by a fascinating review by Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books.

Zadie Smith on Anomalisa, Schopenhauer, human desire and despair https://t.co/JQFwM0P5Qz

— NY Review of Books (@nybooks) February 19, 2016

Once you know that such a connection exists, you can use Google to find it. But Google won't make that connection for you - unless sufficient numbers of other people have already made that connection.

So here's a third option. Twitter allows you to have a list of intelligent film critics, and intelligent magazines containing intelligent film reviews. Either you decide for yourself what counts as intelligent, or you adopt someone else's list. Then you can search through the list for seriously intelligent reviews of the latest film. You can't do anything quite like this with Google.


When you search for something, Google can give you page after page of practically identical material - for example, hundreds of newspapers all repeating the same press release. What one really wants is a search engine that works out which page represents the original source, which pages represent replications with no added content or value, and which pages offer additional commentary and interpretation. It is possible that Twitter, with its conversational structure, may be closer to providing this kind of navigation. But only if the platform can achieve reasonable commercial viability without being polluted.

Artificial Belligerence

Back in the last century, when I was a postgraduate student in the Department of Computing and Control at Imperial College, some members of the department were involved in building an interactive exhibit for the Science Museum next door.

As I recall, the exhibit was designed accept free text from members of the public, and would produce semi-intelligent responses, partly based on the users' input.

Anticipating that young visitors might wish to trick the software into repeating rude words, an obscenity filter was programmed into the software. When some of my fellow students managed to hack into the obscenity file, they were taken aback by the sheer quantity and obscurity of the vocabulary that the academic staff (including some innocent-looking female lecturers) were able to blacklist.

The chatbot recently launched onto Twitter and other social media platforms by Microsoft appears to be a more sophisticated version of that exhibit at the Science Museum so many years ago. But without the precautions.

Within 24 hours, following a series of highly offensive tweets, the chatbot (known as Tay) was taken down. Many of the offensive tweets have been deleted.


Before

Matt Burgess, Microsoft's new chatbot wants to hang out with millennials on Twitter (Wired, 23 March 2016)

Hugh Langley, We played 'Would You Rather' with Tay, Microsoft's AI chat bot (TechRadar, 23 March 2016)

Nick Summers, Microsoft's Tay is an AI chat bot with 'zero chill' (Engadget, 23 March 2016)


Just After

Peter Bright, Microsoft terminates its Tay AI chatbot after she turns into a Nazi (Ars Technica

Andrew Griffin, Tay Tweets: Microsoft AI chatbot designed to learn from Twitter ends up endorsing Trump and praising Hitler (Independent, 24 March 2016)

Alex Hern, Microsoft scrambles to limit PR damage over abusive AI bot Tay (Guardian, 24 March 2016)

Elle Hunt, Tay, Microsoft's AI chatbot, gets a crash course in racism from Twitter (Guardian, 24 March 2016)

Jane Wakefield, Microsoft chatbot is taught to swear on Twitter (BBC News, 24 March 2016)


"So Microsoft created a chat bot that so perfectly emulates a teenager that it went off spouting offensive things just for the sake of getting attention? I would say the engineers in Redmond succeeded beyond their wildest expectations, myself." (Ars Praetorian)


What a difference a day makes!


Some Time After

Peter Lee, Learning from Tay's Introduction (Official Microsoft Blog, 25 March 2016)

Sam Shead, Microsoft says it faces 'difficult' challenges in AI design after chat bot Tay turned into a genocidal racist (Business Insider, 26 March 2016)

Paul Mason, The racist hijacking of Microsoft’s chatbot shows how the internet teems with hate (Guardian, 29 March 2016)

Dina Bass, Clippy’s Back: The Future of Microsoft Is Chatbots (Bloomberg, 30 March 2016)

Rajyasree Sen, Microsoft’s chatbot Tay is a mirror to Twitterverse (LiveMint, 31 March 2016)


Brief Reprise

Jon Russell, Microsoft AI bot Tay returns to Twitter, goes on spam tirade, then back to sleep (TechCrunch, 30 March 2016)



Updated 30 March 2016

Does this chart prove the tech industry's lack of diversity?

Twitter's forthcoming IPO has drawn critical attention to its male-dominated board. Vivek Wadhwa, a fellow at Stanford’s Rock Center for Corporate Governance, recently complained about the lack of women in Twitter’s top ranks. Twitter CEO Dick Costolo responded in childish fashion, tweeting that “Vivek Wadhwa is the Carrot Top of academic sources” and that Wadhwa had a “propensity for silly hyperbole”.

Source: Twitter CEO hits back at gender bias rap (New York Post, 7 October 2013)


Clearly, Twitter is not an isolated case: many commentators have pointed out that this is a more general problem. For example, ValleyWag prints a chart of the corporate boards of the top 17 tech companies, created by Gawker's @JimCookeIII and @NitashaTiku, The Boards Are All White: Charting Diversity Among Tech Directors via @HuffPostTech

But hold on. These are not the top 17 tech companies in the world. They are not even the top 17 tech companies in the USA. Notable omissions from Gawker's list are HP and IBM (which happen to have female CEOs), and Intel (which has a female president). Here is Wikipedia's list of the largest information technology companies (retrieved 9 October 2013).

Obviously a few women in high places doesn't make the problem of gender imbalance disappear. But it really doesn't help the cause of diversity to airbrush out those women who have made it to the top of the tech ladder.

Reflections On Twittering at The Open Group

#ogadc

Using Twitter at The Open Group conference in London this week was a new experience for me, so I thought I'd reflect on it here.

Firstly the mechanics. There was free wifi in the venue; however, many people had difficulty connecting on the first day, and I used my pay-as-you-go dongle instead. Someone proposed a hashtag #ogadc and nearly everyone used that, even though the correct abbreviation for the conference should have been #ogapc.

A number of people including myself started to post 140 character tweets during the sessions. Highlighting key sentences, summarizing or commenting. It was like we were all taking notes into the same notebook. The conference organizers put a large Twitter display screen in the coffee area, so people could read the Tweets from the previous session.

You can see the results here. http://search.twitter.com/search?q=#ogadc

Some people said they found it distracting. For myself, I found that it required a more concentrated listening to the speaker, in order to capture the important points into 140 character Tweets. (Some people continue a single thought over multiple Tweets, but I think that's cheating.)

It also led to new conversations, as Twitter conversations during the sessions developed into face-to-face conversations during the breaks. Sometimes I found I was sitting next to a fellow Twitterer, and could see my Tweets appearing on his screen and vice versa. Thus I made a lot of new friends.

People also posted links to photos as well as video from the evening dinner. I've experienced that at previous conferences via blogging and Technorati and hashtags on Flickr, but Twitter seems to be more effective platform for this kind of thing.

What about people who were not present at the conference? In the recent past, I have picked up interesting Tweets from conferences, so I hoped my followers would be somewhere between tolerant and interested in the unusually high volume of my Tweets. (I probably lost some followers, but I gained some as well. Swings and roundabouts won't break my bones as the saying goes.) Some friends who were not physically present were engaged enough to post Tweets into the conference stream - asking questions or making further comments - and I hope to see more of that kind of virtual participation.

Follow Me Follow (We Are The Hollow Men)

BBC

The BBC is using Twitter to provide alternative links to its content. For example

• Ouch (a disability magazine), The Magazine (a general magazine)
• Test Match Special (a sports unit)

See also

• Flickr and Twitter on BBC Sport

But there are also some twitter feeds that appear to be simple replicas of the BBC's existing RSS feeds, apparently all set up by a developer called Mario Menti.

• BBC, BBC News
• Mario Menti's blog
  

For my part, I don't quite see why would anyone want to follow these via Twitter, when surely any Twittish gadget can follow the RSS feed directly?

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The Magazine on Twitter

A link on the BBC website invites us to "Follow the Magazine in 140 characters or less via Twitter." As some readers have pointed out, the word "less" cannot refer to the 140 characters, because the correct word there would have been "fewer". [See BBC World Service: Learning English.] So it must either refer to the word "follow" or the word "magazine". In other words, following the magazine properly, or (via Twitter) less-than-following something less. So this must have been intended by the sub-editor as a sly dig at Twitter and the Twitterati.

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Follow, Follow, Follow

HOST: Follow me, lads of peace; follow, follow, follow.

SHALLOW: Trust me, a mad host. Follow, gentlemen, follow.

ROBIN: I had rather, forsooth, go before you like a man than follow him like a dwarf.

FALSTAFF: Follow your friend’s counsel.

PAGE: Follow him, gentlemen; see the issue of his search.

Shakespeare (Merry Wives of Windsor). See also Edward Vielmetti (Vacuum).

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