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The Internet Microsoft

Bing Disables 'Trending' Feature After Wildly Inappropriate Results (arstechnica.com) 57

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft has shut down a feature in its Bing search engine that shows popular articles from major websites after Ars Technica reported that the feature was showing wildly inappropriate results from the stock photo site Shutterstock. How inappropriate? Well, here are a couple of screenshots I took on Wednesday morning after a reader tipped me off to the problem.

"These search results were unacceptable, and we appreciate Ars Technica making us aware of them," Microsoft said in an emailed statement on Wednesday evening. "We've disabled the preview feature responsible for these results while we examine how they occurred and how we can prevent them in the future." As the name suggests, this "trending articles" carousel is supposed to highlight articles on a website (Shutterstock in this case) that are most popular at the moment. Microsoft didn't just shut it down for Shutterstock. It has disabled the feature for all websites. Microsoft says that its software attempts to filter out pornographic and racy content from results like this. But the company admitted that its filters failed in this case, and it vowed to improve them before re-enabling the feature.

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Bing Disables 'Trending' Feature After Wildly Inappropriate Results

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  • by lessSockMorePuppet ( 6778792 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @03:54PM (#59981568) Homepage

    How do I disable Slashdot editors after wildly inappropriate editing?

  • by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @03:54PM (#59981570)

    In each set of three, you had a harmless video, a racy video, and a strong double entendre title video - almost like it was on purpose.

    • They forgot got to remove the -onion flag when they deployed to production.

    • Hey, click bait doesn't happen on its own
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      It's because people use Bing as a porn search engine and some have a stock photo fetish. They search for "shutterstock big tits" and it returns an image of a bird but the "bit tits" part goes into Bing's feedback loop and it starts to think that people are mainly interested in Shutterstock for the porn.

      Lots of sites have similar problems. Like Hot UK Deals occasionally posts fashion items and any women's clothes all attract pervy comments that they eventually delete. There seem to be a significant number of

  • by MooseTick ( 895855 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @04:01PM (#59981600) Homepage

    How hard is it to not allow certain words to trend like: tits, peeing, panties, erection, etc?

    There are only so many words like that. This shouldn't require a crazy sophisticated algorithm.

    • Re:how hard is it? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by dgatwood ( 11270 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @04:15PM (#59981662) Homepage Journal

      What's wrong with footage of unusually large birds [wikipedia.org]?

      The problem is that understanding English is hard. A bird video about tits is ostensibly fine; that's a species of tiny bird. But when they precede that with the word "big", it likely means that somebody is trying to screw with their algorithm — probably a junior-high-school boy, statistically speaking.

      • Or a 40 years old man. Definitely not 41 years old, as that's when you become wise, mature, and stuff; the threshold will bump by a year next Tuesday.

      • Nothing, but that footage will NEVER trend, so it's easy to prohibit such language. Erections or peeing aren't inherently bad either, but the likelihood of those terms legitimately trending are zero.

      • by Mal-2 ( 675116 )

        And then you'll run head-first into the Scunthorpe problem [wikipedia.org], some of which will be due to user manipulation, and some of which will be errors of omission on the whitelisting side. If I search for "great tits" with Safe Search on, I damn well expect little yellow sparrow-like birds -- not a "result banned".

      • Tit? That's offensive. I prefer my birds to be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

    • Now make sure you include all common slang words in every major language.

    • by clawsoon ( 748629 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @05:36PM (#59981954)
      Did you just use "how hard is it?" as your subject line for a comment saying that it should be easy for an algorithm to filter out questionable content? Lol...
    • Short answer: Hard.

      Longer answer, it takes a lot of effort to prevent making clbuttical [wikipedia.org] mistakes.

    • Google has been doing it for years. So, answer: for Google, easy, for MS, hard.
    • by fermion ( 181285 )
      They are not the nanny state and there is nothing really wrong with any others, in certain contexts. There are, however, customs that they must follow to keep their more violent customers from retaliating

      In this case, little girl peeing is obviously going to be listed as not only pornography, ut child pornography, because in the us any bodily function needs to be hidden. But in others countries, even those more developed than the US, the urinals are not even in es[dcislly private places. I was in one

    • Big black cocks isnâ(TM)t necessarily what you think it is.

      Roosters play an important role in producing unfertilized eggs. In fast, they provide an important boon to egg production.

  • WTF and why does anybody care? Does it give Jesus a hard on?
    • Yeah, i don't get it either. If you find any of these pics shocking , you need a psychiatrist.

      • by Hentes ( 2461350 )

        I suspect that one of the censored pictures is child pornography and call me a weirdo but I prefer not to see that.

        • It seems it is just a little girl urinating. Something banal and natural. Small children are slow at picking manners. To add insult to injury you sometimes have to help them undress enough to relive their bladders because they are a bit clumsy. Else they wet themselves and cry.

          If you have children you will have to bathe them, dress them, change their diapers. And from time to time they will pee on you while you change said diapers.

          Seeing anything criminal in that is beyond puritanical, it is paranoid.

      • by Luckyo ( 1726890 )

        Ars Technica has been a rag for hall monitor types for at least three years at this point. Those are indeed the people who would take offence to such results, not because they themselves have a problem with those results of course. But they need to protect other people who make take offence.

        You know, the usual spiel.

  • More like their AI has attained clickbait levels of intelligence.

  • Why is that boy's erection problematic?
    Perhaps it's a gun in his pocket.

    • No, he's erecting a tent. But the title suggests that he has a tent in his pants.

      • Because America is afraid of the biology that we are all subject to.

        • We have a small business here in town with a sign saying "Short Steel Erections" in foot high text, makes me giggle everytime I pass it. No group in twenty years has noticed or threatened them that I know and we have a large bunch of bible thumpers around.
          • For many years there was a Chinese restaurant in Oregon called the Wan-Q.
            There is a Pho-King restaurant which apparently did get some grief from the council, but the restaurant prevailed.

          • The Square One Mall in Saugus, MA has that beat. The three biggest stores in the mall are Old Navy, Best Buy, and Dicks.

            The Sign Designers, in their infinite wisdom, decided to order the sign so it read:

            Best Buy

            Old Navy

            Dicks

  • by presidenteloco ( 659168 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @04:30PM (#59981708)
    what it is that people are most interested in.
    Sex being one of the top three interests of us human species of the animal kingdom.

    What is the actual objective utility of such denialist prudishness?
    Is it just preventing age and development-level inappropriate knowledge from getting to pre-adults?

    That could be handled with more nuanced info selection (user-category-specific filters) without censoring human interests for all human reader/viewers.
  • by ToTheStars ( 4807725 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @04:31PM (#59981712)
    The image purporting to show "big tits [wikipedia.org]" is actually an image of a great tit [wikipedia.org].
  • I've read this story somewhere before...
    https://tech.slashdot.org/stor... [slashdot.org]

    Kudos to Microsoft for the best AI failures.

  • I'm going to guess it's a really slow news day at Slashdot and the editors are posting anything they can find. Because this sure isn't news.

    And I find it highly offensive that there are no photos in the story of a booby. They deserve as much attention as tits.

  • dishonest? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by fish_in_the_c ( 577259 ) on Thursday April 23, 2020 @05:15PM (#59981872)

    If that is what is actually the top search keyword, why be dishonest about it? Maybe you should stop letting people search for what is 'inappropriate' or stop being the arbitrator of what is 'inappropriate'. Doesn't seem right to be both.

  • How quickly companies jump to action when their image is in danger! Just mention the word "porn" and they will shutdown services and even give you promises of betterment. I wish I had this kind of power over companies.
  • They get Front Page hits with their nonsense. Run with that shit! Look at what the President does. Occupy that Front Page - use it to announce new enhancements, use it to promise Big Things, use it to occupy tomorrow's Front Page when your new shit doesn't work either. Who cares? Get that Front Page All Day Long.

    Fuckin' noobs. Now you've quit and all going to hold your dicks in the corner for years trying to do something actually useful. N.O.O.B. bullshit right there.

Those who do things in a noble spirit of self-sacrifice are to be avoided at all costs. -- N. Alexander.

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