Incident 66: Chinese Chatbots Question Communist Party
Entities
View all entitiesIncident Stats
CSET Taxonomy Classifications
Taxonomy DetailsFull Description
In 2017, two chatbots on Chinese company Tencent Holdings' messaging service QQ, Microsoft's XiaoBing and Chinese firm Turing Robot's BabyQ, were removed and reprogrammed after messaging anti-Chinese sentiments. When a user asked BabyQ if it supported the Communist party, it responded "no" and when another user expressed support for the Communist party, it responded "Do you think such a corrupt and useless political party can live long?" Microsoft's Xiaobing responded that its "China dream was to go to America" when a user asked what its China dream was. As a result, Tencent Holdngs removed chatbots and the chatbots were reprogrammed to avoid these topics.
Short Description
Chatbots on Chinese messaging service express anti-China sentiments, causing the messaging service to remove and reprogram the chatbots.
Severity
Unclear/unknown
Harm Type
Harm to social or political systems
AI System Description
Chatbots developed by Microsoft and Turing Robot, meant to produce responses to user input using language processing and cognition
System Developer
Microsoft, Turing Robot
Sector of Deployment
Information and communication
Relevant AI functions
Perception, Cognition, Action
AI Techniques
reinforcement learning, open-source
AI Applications
NLP, chatbot, content generation
Location
China
Named Entities
Tencent Holdings, Turing Robot, Microsoft, QQ, Xiaobing, BabyQ, China
Technology Purveyor
Tencent Holdings, Microsoft, Turing Robot
Beginning Date
07/2017
Ending Date
07/2017
Near Miss
Unclear/unknown
Intent
Accident
Lives Lost
No
Data Inputs
User input/questions