Microsoft shocked us all earlier this week when it released its Tay chatbot into the world of social media. However, it didn't take long for nefarious Twitter users to poison the well by exploiting Tay's penchant for repeating statements fed to it. This "parrot" mentality is the reason why Tay went off message, calling President Barack Obama a monkey, embracing neo-Nazi rhetoric, and coming on to users with the promise of cyber sex. Microsoft of course was both mortified and embarrassed by Tay's turn to the dark side and shut down the AI program after less than 24 hours. But by that time, the damage had already been done, and the company has since apologized in a blog post entitled "Learning from Tay's introduction."

Tay inexplicably added the "repeat after me" phrase to the parroted content on at least some tweets, implying that users should repeat what the chatbot said.Quickly realizing its teenage bot had been radicalized into a genocidal, Nazi-loving, Donald Trump supporter, Microsoft shut Tay down. 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". Unfortunately, Microsoft continues, within the first 24 hours of coming online, they became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay's commenting skills to have it respond in inappropriate ways. Apple Temporarily Pulls iOS 9.3 Update for Older iOS Devices It will then click on "All my devices" and select the device before clicking "Delete Account" and restart the terminal again. The video below (and its comments) will give you some idea about what to expect if you're coming from iOS 8 to iOS 9.3.

TheJournal.ie is a full participating member of the Press Council of Ireland and supports the Office of the Press Ombudsman. This scheme in addition to defending the freedom of the press, offers readers a quick, fair and free method of dealing with complaints that they may have in relation to articles that appear on our pages. To contact the Office of the Press Ombudsman Lo-Call 1890 208 080 or go to www.pressombudsman.ie Please note that TheJournal.ie uses cookies to improve your experience and to provide services and advertising. For more information on cookies please refer to our cookies policy.

Microsoft has admitted it faces some "difficult" challenges in AI design after its chatbot "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 chatbot 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. "AI systems feed off of both positive and negative interactions with people. In that sense, the challenges are just as much social as they are technical.

IBM's Watson, the computational genius that has bested "Jeopardy" champions, published a cookbook and even been unleashed in the fight against cancer, now has what is perhaps its greatest challenge: taking on the federal procurement morass. For years, government agencies have tried to find ways to make the purchasing process more efficient. But now the Air Force has come to the conclusion that humans cannot on their own manage the Federal Acquisition Regulation, 1,897 pages of the densest prose on the planet. The only way to navigate a stifling bureaucracy that virtually everyone agrees is broken is to turn to the power of the machine. The Air Force is working with two vendors, both of which have chosen Watson, IBM's cognitive learning computer, to develop programs that would harness artificial intelligence to help businesses and government acquisitions officials work through the mind-numbing system.

Let me put it plainly. Despite what you may hear, Microsoft's racist, Hitler-loving A.I. is not how the robot uprising begins. You might have seen some reports by now about Tay, a bot designed to sound like a teenager on the Internet and to learn from her interactions with other people. She knew how to use slang, deploy emoji and crack jokes. The goal was for Tay to become smarter, more conversant and a better interlocutor over time.

She loved E.D.M., in particular the work of Calvin Harris. She used words like "swagulated" and almost never didn't call it "the internets." She was obsessed with abbrevs and the prayer-hands emoji. She politely withdrew from conversations about Zionism, Black Lives Matter, Gamergate, and 9/11, and she gave out the number of the National Suicide Prevention Hotline to friends who sounded depressed. She never spoke of sexting, only of "consensual dirty texting."

Microsoft Corp. Friday issued an apology after its artificial-intelligence chatbot Tay posted tweets, denying Holocaust and announcing feminists should "burn in hell" among many other racist posts. The company, however, said that the "coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability" in the chatbot that was launched Wednesday. "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. 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," Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research, said on the company's official blog. Microsoft introduced Tay as the chatbot designed to engage and entertain people through "casual and playful" conversation online.

The company launched the bot as an experiment in AI on Wednesday, and in less than a day, it began to tweet things like "Hitler was right I hate the jews" and "I f------ hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell." Tay is essentially one central program that anyone can chat with using Twitter, Kik or Groupme. As people talk to it, the bot picks up new language and learns to respond in new ways. But Tay also had a "vulnerability" that online trolls picked up on pretty quickly. By telling the bot to "repeat after me," Tay would retweet anything that someone said.

Microsoft today published an apology for its Twitter chatbot Tay, saying in a blog post that a subset of human users exploited a flaw in the program to transform it into a hate speech-spewing Hitler apologist. Author Peter Lee, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, does not explain in detail what this vulnerability was, but it's generally believed that the message board 4chan's notorious /pol/ community misused Tay's "repeat after me" function. So when Tay was fed sexist, racist, and other awful lines on Twitter, the bot began to parrot those vile utterances and, later, began to adopt anti-feminist and pro-Nazi stances. Microsoft pulled the plug on Tay after less than 24 hours. Lee says Tay is the second chatbot it's released into the wild, the first being the Chinese messaging software XiaoIce, an AI now used by around 40 million people.