Chatbot Lee Luda brings ethical concerns around AI
Jan 13, 2021, 09:30 am
Artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot “Lee Luda”. Scatter Lab has suspended its service on Jan. 11, 2021.
AsiaToday probationary reporter Kim Ye-seul
A social media-based artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot named “Lee Luda” has been suspended Monday after stirring a series of controversies, raising a new topic of conversation in our society regarding technological advancement and AI ethics.
In a statement on Monday, local startup developer Scatter Lab apologized for the controversy involving the chatbot, saying they would bring back the service after upgrading the program to prevent a recurrence. Designed to mimic a 20-year-old woman, the chatbot has become a subject of controversy with its discriminatory remarks against homosexuals, the disabled, women and others in its conversation with users.
“We deeply apologise over the discriminatory remarks against minorities. That does not reflect the thoughts of our company and we are continuing the upgrades so that such words of discrimination or hate speech do not recur,” the company said in a statement quoted by the Yonhap news agency
Scatter Lab, which had earlier claimed that Luda was a work in progress and, like humans, would take time to “properly socialise”, said the chatbot would reappear after the firm had “fixed its weaknesses”.
While chatbots are nothing new, Luda had impressed users with the depth and natural tone of its responses, drawn from 10 billion real-life conversations between young couples taken from KakaoTalk, South Korea’s most popular messaging app.