God Help Us, These Researchers Are Using Reddit to Teach a Supercomputer to Talk

Have we learned nothing from Tay, the Microsoft chatbot that spewed foul racist garbage after only a few hours of interacting with trolls on Twitter? Sure, Reddit models a colloquial tone, as Sophie Kleeman at Gizmodo points out, and its many communities discuss a wide range of subjects, but it is also frequently the boneyard where all grace and decency go to die. Will OpenAI's learning systems absorb strategies for choosing careers and college majors, or only gain expertise in nihilistic lulz and platform-specific acronyms? At least, a success from the researchers on this front would break new ground: They'd have created the only brain ever to get smarter by reading Reddit.