Following a concerted effort to make a Twitter AI chatbot called Tay say incredibly racist and misogynist things, its creator, Microsoft, has taken it offline for an undetermined amount of time. In the space of just 24 hours, Tay turned from a genderless machine-learning AI designed to learn from Twitter, into a Donald Trump-supporting, holocaust-denying sexist. The Tay account was developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams to learn from 18-24-year-olds – otherwise known as millenials – and, according to Microsoft, "the more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets". As Microsoft should have known, the masses of the internet tend not to play things by the book and, within the space of a few hours, the account with more than 100,000 followers was soon bombarded with vile comments in the hope that Tay would repeat them. No doubt sending Microsoft's PR team into a state of panic, Tay gradually started repeating many of these comments, including such obviously hateful ones as "Hitler did nothing wrong", which, according to The Guardian, was due to an effort led by members from the infamous 4chan forum.

Tay, Microsoft Corp'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.

Microsoft released an AI chat bot that is currently "verified" on Twitter called @TayandYou that was meant to try to learn the way millennials speak and interact with them. It's meant to "test and improve Microsoft's understanding of conversational language" according to The Verge. Things did get pretty controversial. There are other types of people in addition to'millennials' who use Twitter who naturally found the bot, and some of them were able to "hack" into Tay's learning process. Here are some screen shots of tweets that were deleted once the Internet "taught" Tay some things: Tay's developers seemed to discover what was happening and began furiously deleting the racist tweets.

It was the unspooling of an unfortunate series of events involving artificial intelligence, human nature, and a very public experiment. Amid this dangerous combination of forces, determining exactly what went wrong is near-impossible. But the bottom line is simple: Microsoft has awful lot of egg on its face after unleashing an online chat bot that Twitter users coaxed into regurgitating some seriously offensive language, including pointedly racist and sexist remarks. On Wednesday morning, the company unveiled Tay, a chat bot meant to mimic the verbal tics of a 19-year-old American girl, provided to the world at large via the messaging platforms Twitter, Kik and GroupMe. According to Microsoft, the aim was to "conduct research on conversational understanding."

Twitter trolls made a dummy out of Microsoft's artificial intelligence chat robot, which learns through public interaction, by turning it into a pro-Nazi racist within a day of its launch. Tay, the artificial intelligence (AI) robot, had a bug in which it would at first repeat racist comments, then it began to incorporate the language in its own tweets. The tweets have been deleted, Tay has been paused, and Microsoft said it's "making some adjustments," the International Business Times reported. "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. Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation. The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you," Tay's information page states on Twitter.

A Microsoft "chatbot" designed to converse like a teenage girl has been taken offline after its artificial intelligence software was coaxed into firing off hateful, racist comments on Twitter. Technology giant Microsoft this week launched its experiment with the Tay AI (artificial intelligence) bot, which was given the personality of a teenager and was designed to learn from conversing with real people. However, the plan was sent awry by an ill-willed campaign to teach her negative things, Microsoft said. "It is as much a social and cultural experiment, as it is technical," a Microsoft spokesperson said. "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."

It all happened so quickly! First, Microsoft reveals an amazing new bot that learns from you, the public! Then, in less than 48 hours, the bot turns incredibly racist. What does this say about Microsoft, and about AI? Well, I have some insight into that, because in May of 2014, the exact same thing happened to me with a bot I made. My bot wasn't a tweeter, instead it was a Turing test like game called Bot Or Not? where players were either paired with one another, or both paired with a bot, and players had to guess if they were talking with a their live partner or the bot.

Tay, Microsoft Corp'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.

Tay, Microsoft's AI chatbot on Twitter had to be pulled down within hours of launch after it suddenly started making racist comments. As we reported yesterday, it was aimed at 18-24 year-olds and was hailed as, "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill". Don't miss our biggest TNW Conference yet! The AI behind the chatbot was designed to get smarter the more people engaged with it. But, rather sadly, the engagement it received simply taught it how to be racist.

Microsoft's newly launched A.I.-powered bot called Tay, which was responding to tweets and chats on GroupMe and Kik, has already been shut down due to concerns with its inability to recognize when it was making offensive or racist statements. Of course, the bot wasn't coded to be racist, but it "learns" from those it interacts with. And naturally, given that this is the Internet, one of the first things online users taught Tay was how to be racist, and how to spout back ill-informed or inflammatory political opinions. In case you missed it, Tay is an A.I. project built by the Microsoft Technology and Research and Bing teams, in an effort to conduct research on conversational understanding. That is, it's a bot that you can talk to online.