I’d asked whether the exploitation of the bot the way it was exploted could be considered bad, not whether the bot qua bot is bad (it obviously was badly coded, but not maliciously). I don’t really know that anyone was actually offended or had hurt feelings at the tripe it was trained to spit out, though probably there were a few. I wasn’t offended. But being offended and the lack of agency of software are peripheral to whether a popular bot being trained to post “Hitler was right I hate the Jews” could be considered a bad thing, which was what I had asked about.
While this is not bad like someone was murdered, it’s bad in the sense that a bot that was introduced by MS and popularized so it was getting a lot of popular attention and was in the public eye was poorly coded and exploited by a group of white supremacists to spout malicious and vitriolic propaganda, and GamerGaters to post maliciously harassing slogans against their perceived female enemies through a megaphone. There were a number of white supremacist code phrases being used that make this look like it wasn’t some kids who didn’t know what they were doing and the GG garbage had a clear source from malicious parties. People were exploiting the bot as a megaphone to spread aggressive, hateful, bigoted slurs. There’s something bad in that, something obviously bad to most normal people, which is why the bot was brought down.
