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.

Microsoft has said it is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched this week. The company released an official apology after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade, likening feminism to cancer and suggesting the Holocaust did not happen. Related: Tay, Microsoft's AI chatbot, gets a crash course in racism from Twitter 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 fed the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down on Thursday . Following the disastrous experiment, Microsoft initially only gave a terse statement, saying Tay was a "learning machine" and "some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it."

Microsoft has said it is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched this week, after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade. The bot, known as Tay, was targeted at 18 to 24-year-olds in the US and 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. 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 taken its AI chatbot Tay offline after machine learning taught the software agent to parrot hate speech. Tay, introduced on Wednesday as a conversational companion for 18 to 24 year-olds with mobile devices, turned out to be a more astute student of human nature than its programmers anticipated. Less than a day after the bot's debut it endorsed Hitler, a validation of Godwin's law that ought to have been foreseen. Engineers from Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams created Tay as an experiment in conversational understanding. The bot was designed to learn from user input and user social media profiles.

A user told Tay to tweet Trump propaganda; she did (though the tweet has now been deleted). Microsoft has apologized for the conduct of its racist, abusive machine learning chatbot, Tay. The bot, which was supposed to mimic conversation with a 19-year-old woman over Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, was turned off less than 24 hours after going online because she started promoting Nazi ideology and harassing other Twitter users. The company appears to have been caught off-guard by her behavior. A similar bot, named XiaoIce, has been in operation in China since late 2014.

Microsoft has apologized for the conduct of its racist, abusive machine learning chatbot, Tay. The bot, which was supposed to mimic conversation with a 19-year-old woman over Twitter, Kik, and GroupMe, was turned off less than 24 hours after going online because she started promoting Nazi ideology and harassing other Twitter users. The company appears to have been caught off-guard by her behavior. A similar bot, named XiaoIce, has been in operation in China since late 2014. XiaoIce has had more than 40 million conversations apparently without major incident.

Microsoft recently unveiled Tay, an artificial intelligent chat bot developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding. The company stated that the more you chat with Tay, "the smarter it gets, learning to engage people through casual and playful conversation." Microsoft launched a verified Twitter account for "Tay" – billed as its "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill". However, pretty soon after Tay launched, people starting tweeting the bot with all sorts of misogynistic, racist, and Donald Trumpist remarks. And as Tay was being essentially a robot parrot with an internet connection, started repeating these sentiments back to users.

If it wasn't already clear that Microsoft learned a few hard lessons after its Tay AI went off the deep end with racist and sexist remarks, it is now. The folks in Redmond have posted reflections on the incident that shed a little more light on both what happened and what the company learned. Believe it or not, Microsoft did stress-test its youth-like code to make sure you had a "positive experience." However, it also admits that it wasn't prepared for what would happen when it exposed Tay to a wider audience. It made a "critical oversight" that didn't account for a dedicated group exploiting a vulnerability in Tay's behavior that would make her repeat all kinds of vile statements.

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. We will do everything possible to limit technical exploits but also know we cannot fully predict all possible human interactive misuses without learning from mistakes. To do AI right, one needs to iterate with many people and often in public forums.

Microsoft's artificially intelligent "chat bot" Tay went rogue earlier this week, harassing some users with tweets full of racist and misogynistic language. The AI was programmed to sound like a millennial and learn natural speech by interacting with people online, but Tay picked up some pretty vile ideas from trolls and wound up saying things like "feminists ... should all die and burn in hell" and "Hitler was right." Microsoft took the bot offline Thursday to make adjustments. Viewed through a certain lens, there's actually a bit to celebrate about this spectacular failure. The bot did exactly what it was designed to do: acquire knowledge from the people it talked with.