Microsoft is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched last week, a company official wrote on Friday, after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade. The bot, known as Tay, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users started feeding the program, forcing Microsoft to shut it down on Thursday. Following the setback, Microsoft said in a blog post it would revive Tay only if its engineers could find a way to prevent web users from influencing the chatbot in ways that undermine the company's principles and values. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," wrote Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research.

Microsoft has apologised for creating an artificially intelligent chatbot that quickly turned into a holocaust-denying racist. But in doing so made it clear Tay's views were a result of nurture, not nature. Tay confirmed what we already knew: people on the internet can be cruel. Tay, aimed at 18-24-year-olds on social media, was targeted by a "coordinated attack by a subset of people" after being launched earlier this week. Within 24 hours Tay had been deactivated so the team could make "adjustments".

Julie Sobowale is a freelance journalist and lawyer based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, specializing in legal reporting. She writes about trends in the legal industry including legal technology, innovation, entrepreneurship, diversity and major shifts in legal culture. Her work has appeared in publications from the American Bar Association, the Canadian Bar Association, the Canadian Corporate Council Association, Canadian Lawyer and the Nova Scotia Barristers Society. She's also given presentations on legal trends, alternative careers and legal education. She graduated from the Dalhousie Schulich School of Law in 2012 and was the recipient of the Dalhousie Faculty of Law Leadership Award.

"The robots are coming" is not something Paul Revere said during the American Revolution, but it is certainly something many people have uttered over the years. So have we finally reached the tipping point where artificial intelligence and robots will begin to take over human jobs en masse? Perhaps not, but we are closer to the time when they will be even more essential assets and presences in the workforce, explains Martin Ford, the author of the book "Rise of the Robots." I caught up with Ford at The Economist magazine's Innovation Forum event, which was held earlier this month. He pointed out that artificial intelligence is making its way into sectors that were once manned by only man, including the legal profession, where computer systems such as Watson could muscle in on human territory to provide legal counsel, and even journalism where stories are being written without direct human input about some articles.

Microsoft had to shutdown its AI-powered chat bot less than 24 hours after its launch. This "conversational understanding" experiment was promising. The more Twitter users would chat with Tay, the smarter it was supposed to get. In fact, Tay became more human, which is not always synonymous with smart. Internet users bombarded Tay with misogynist, racist and abusive tweets.

Microsoft is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched last week, a company official wrote on Friday, after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade. The bot, known as Tay, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users started feeding the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down on Thursday. Following the setback, Microsoft said in a blog post it would revive Tay only if its engineers could find a way to prevent Web users from influencing the chatbot in ways that undermine the company's principles and values. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," wrote Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research.

Microsoft has admitted it faces some "difficult" challenges in AI design after its chat bot, "Tay," had an offensive meltdown on social media. Microsoft issued an apology in a blog post on Friday explaining it was "deeply sorry" after its artificially intelligent chat bot turned into a genocidal racist on Twitter. In the blog post, Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research, wrote: "Looking ahead, we face some difficult – and yet exciting – research challenges in AI design. Tay, an AI bot aimed at 18- to 24-year-olds, was deactivated within 24 hours of going live after she made a number of tweets that were highly offensive. Microsoft began by simply deleting Tay's inappropriate tweets before turning her off completely. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," wrote Lee in the blog post. "Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values." Microsoft's aim with the chat bot was to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding," with Tay able to learn from "her" conversations and get progressively "smarter." But Tay proved a smash hit with racists, trolls, and online troublemakers from websites like 4chan -- who persuaded Tay to blithely use racial slurs, defend white-supremacist propaganda, and even outright call for genocide. Lee added: "Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay.

From the street, through Beijing's heavy smog, it can sometimes be hard to make out IBM's Chinese headquarters: a towering office building with a distinctive undulating architectural flourish and a large company logo at the top. But just a short distance away, on the northeast outskirts of the capital, IBM computer scientists are using artificial intelligence to develop what they think will be a way to manage China's notorious and chronic pollution problem more successfully. The team is using complex computer models and machine learning to calculate how pollution will spread across the city. The researchers can now produce pollution forecasts, with a resolution of a kilometer square, up to 10 days in advance. These predictions can also tell the government how it might act to avoid the worst scenarios--for instance, by shutting certain factories, or by reducing the number of cars on the road.

TOKYO Advances in artificial intelligence are blurring the line between humans and robots. As robots interact ever more closely with us, new ethical questions are emerging related to issues from violence to sex and privacy. In February, a video uploaded to YouTube by Boston Dynamics, an American robot developer, sparked controversy. Some viewers were apparently shocked by a scene in which a man knocks down a box that was being lifted by a two-legged humanoid robot, developed by the company, and another scene in which the man knocks the robot down from behind with a stick. "Stop bullying robots," one viewer commented below the video.