The parable of Boaty McBoatface....

I am not a humourless dullard. Really, I’m not.

I mention it because from what I am about to say, you may think I am nothing more than a dismal little prig. Nonetheless, here it is: Not everything has to end up as an oh so ironic internet meme. There are some things, surely, that this kind of post-millennial smugness is simply beneath. I’m talking here about the Boaty McBoatface debacle. And you’ll know what I mean – this really is the vote that has caught an entire nation. EU…what EU? It’s the naming of the country’s new £200 million polar research ship that has been the democratic issue of the day.

NERC, the funding council who commissioned the ship – set to be the biggest and most advanced research ship we have ever built – took the decision to ask the internet what they should name her. And my how the Twitterati jostled to come up with the wittiest suggestion. There was a clear winner – at the close of the poll more than 124,000 people voted for the ship to be named Boaty McBoatface. Now – it won’t be. I mean it can’t be, can it? At the time of writing this, Science Minister Jo Johnson has strongly hinted that despite the democratic connotations, he won’t allow a name that lasts no “longer than a social media news cycle”.

This is an advanced piece of equipment to take scientists into harm’s way in order to gather data about the most vulnerable parts of our fragile planet. Whatever ‘great British whimsy’ has to say about her name – let’s, please, remain respectful of what will literally be a flagship of our scientific endeavour. That said – as online interventions go, this was at least good natured. Not every example of unleashing science on the great unwashed of the internet ends in such innocence.

It’s the naming of the country’s new £200 million polar research ship that has been the democratic issue of the day.

The computer scientists and AI specialists at Microsoft learnt this lesson recently, and learnt it hard. They had to shut down a machine learning experiment they had developed. It took the guise of an ‘AI chatbot’ on twitter named ‘Tay’ and was designed to monitor tweets while learning how to respond using casual speech patterns. The problem? In just 24 hours Tay had turned into a Hitler-loving sex troll.

‘She’ – oh yes, they had made it a ‘her’ – was meant to help researchers understand how their AI algorithms could handle conversational learning. “The more you chat with Tay” they said, “the smarter she gets.” It seems however that the web caught wind of a corporate agenda, and the account was bombarded by racists, misogynists and general online riffraff. And Tay, presumably, did exactly as she was programmed to do – she learnt. Unfortunately what she learnt was how to deny the holocaust, how to suggest Hitler had done nothing wrong and how to insult people using a variety of sexual slurs.

The computer scientists and AI specialists at Microsoft learnt this lesson recently, and learnt it hard.

Once again the immense plebery of the internet’s lowest orders had derailed an otherwise potentially interesting experiment. But maybe I am off the mark. Perhaps it was all just PR? I doubt a research ship has ever gotten so much attention. And machine learning? Surely a hard sell for any PR department. Perhaps NERC and Microsoft are rubbing their much talked-about hands together, confident that we have all played our part in their publicity stunt beautifully.

Phil Prime