Microsoft's AI Twitter bot goes dark after racist, sexist tweets
A Microsoft representative said on Thursday that the company was -"making adjustments-" to the chatbot while the account is quiet.
Tay, Microsoft's so-called chatbot that uses artificial intelligence to engage with millennials on Twitter, lasted less than a day before it was hobbled by a barrage of racist and sexist comments by Twitter users that it parroted back to them.
TayTweets (@TayandYou), which began tweeting on Wednesday, was designed to become -"smarter-" as more users interacted with it, according to its Twitter biography. But it was shut down by Microsoft early on Thursday after it made a series of inappropriate tweets.
A Microsoft representative said on Thursday that the company was -"making adjustments-" to the chatbot while the account is quiet.
-"Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay’s commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways,-" the representative said in a written statement supplied to Reuters, without elaborating.
According to Tay's -"about-" page linked to the Twitter profile, -"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.-"
While Tay began its Twitter tenure with a handful of innocuous tweets, the account quickly devolved into a bullhorn for hate speech, repeating anti-Semitic, racist and sexist invective hurled its way by other Twitter users.
After Twitter user Room (@codeinecrazzy) tweeted -"jews did 9/11-" to the account on Wednesday, @TayandYou responded -"Okay ... jews did 9/11.-" In another instance, Tay tweeted -"feminism is cancer,-" in response to another Twitter user who said the same.
A handful of the offensive tweets were later deleted, according to some technology news outlets. A screen grab published by tech news website the Verge showed TayTweets tweeting, -"I (expletive) hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell.-"
Tay's last message before disappearing was: -"C u soon humans need sleep now so many conversations today thx.-"
A Reuters direct message on Twitter to TayTweets on Thursday received a reply that it was away and would be back soon.
Social media users had mixed reactions to the inappropriate tweets.
-"Thanks, Twitter. You turned Microsoft's AI teen into a horny racist,-" tweeted Matt Chandler (@mattchandl3r).
