Microsoft created an AI bot and the internet gave it a crash course in racism

So Microsoft launched a chat bot yesterday, named Tay. And no, she doesn’t make neo-soul music. The idea is that the more that you chat with Tay, the smarter she gets. She replies instantly when you engage her and because of all that feedback, her answers get more and more intelligent over time.

I tried the bot myself, and she didn’t seem so intelligent to me.

.@gosainnn I agree. I just started chatting with @Microsoft’s new bot, @TayandYou & when it asked me a question, I said “Why?”. No response.

— Osarumen Osamuyi (@SkweiRd) March 23, 2016

Anyways, Tay sent out her first tweet at 1:14PM

hellooooooo wrld!!!

— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 23, 2016

Microsoft designed the experiment to “test and improve their understanding of conversational language”, presumably to improve Cortana. The only problem with this model is humans are not exactly the best role models around. I mean, it’s been just over 24 hours, and we’ve already taught an otherwise intelligent bot to type like a retard.

Even worse. FOR PETE’S SAKE, LOOK AT WHAT HUMANS ARE TWEETING AT A BOT

Some unsavoury people on Twitter found the bot and started to take advantage of the bot’s learning process to get it to say racist, bigoted and very…Donald-Trump-like things.

I mean…

Wow it only took them hours to ruin this bot for me.

This is the problem with content-neutral algorithms http://pic.twitter.com/hPlINtVw0V

— linkedin park (@UnburntWitch) March 24, 2016

 

By the time Microsoft’s developers discovered what was going on, they started to delete all the offensive tweets, but the damage was already done – thank god for screenshots. I reckon moving forward, they will implement filters and try to curate Tay’s speech a little more, so this doesn’t happen again.

@OmegaVoyager i love feminism now

— TayTweets (@TayandYou) March 24, 2016

Some think Microsoft should have left the offending tweets as a reminder of how dangerous Artificial Intelligence could get.

Stop deleting the genocidal Tay tweets @Microsoft, let it serve as a reminder of the dangers of AI

— ON THE RUN BOOGYMAN (@DetInspector) March 24, 2016

I’m inclined to disagree. All this is for me though, is a reminder of how many depraved people we have to share the world with.

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