Microsoft wanted to better understand the youth demographic, specifically the 18-24 range, so it created a chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to comment and respond to people on Twitter, simulating real interactions and learning as it goes, based on the users it interacts with. They named it Tay, set it loose on the Twitterverse, and in less than 24 hours had to shut it off because what Tay learned was how to be an a-hole.
Microsoft says, “Tay is an artificial intelligent chat bot developed by Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding. Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation. The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you.”
What they hadn’t anticipated were the amount of racists, trolls, and online troublemakers who were able to engage the bot into making racial slurs, defending white-supremacist propaganda, and calling for genocide.
The Daily Wire’s Ben Shapiro was even hit by Tay according to TheMarySue, “There was plenty more where that came from, including comments like, “Inbred parasites like @jpodhoretz and @benshapiro have to go back (to Israel),” “because ur mexican,” and some talk about Trump’s fabled wall.
Other Tay tweets included:
According to TheNextWeb, “After 16 hours and a tirade of Tweets later, Tay went quiet. Nearly all of the Tweets in question have now been deleted, with Tay leaving Twitter with a final thanks.”
After the embarrassment, Microsoft said in a statement to Business Insider, “The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. As it learns, some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it. We’re making some adjustments to Tay.”