Microsoft introduced a chat robot designed to interact in the style of a "teen girl" on Twitter, and it went rogue almost immediately, spouting racist opinions, conspiracy theories and a fondness for genocide. The artificial intelligence (AI) robot named "Tay" -- @Tayandyou on Twitter -- was intended to chat with 18-to-24-year-olds, with the idea that she would learn from each tweet and get progressively smarter. Clearly, Microsoft had forgotten that Twitter is home to a huge amount of trolls, racists and general troublemakers, who jumped at the chance to "teach" the teenage "chatbot" about life. The AI chatbot Tay is a machine learning project, designed for human engagement. As it learns, some of its responses are inappropriate and indicative of the types of interactions some people are having with it.

TayAndYou was supposed to be a Teenage Girl-like AI for twitter. Microsoft's proof it could create chat bots to do customer service. The problem was Microsoft didn't leave on any training wheels, and didn't make the bot self reflective. We have all had a bad day, and wanted to tell the person who is bugging us that they are acting like a Nazi. Tay, on the other hand, didn't know that she should just ignore the people who act like Nazi's, and so she became one herself.

Tay, the company's online chat bot designed to talk like a teen, started spewing racist and hateful comments on Twitter on Wednesday, and Microsoft (MSFT, Tech30) shut Tay down around midnight. The company has already deleted most of the offensive tweets, but not before people took screenshots. "N------ like @deray should be hung! "I f------ hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell." Microsoft blames Tay's behavior on online trolls, saying in a statement that there was a "coordinated effort" to trick the program's "commenting skills."

Two months ago, Stephen Hawking warned humanity that its days may be numbered: the physicist was among over 1,000 artificial intelligence experts who signed an open letter about the weaponization of robots and the ongoing "military artificial intelligence arms race." Overnight we got a vivid example of just how quickly "artificial intelligence" can spiral out of control when Microsoft's AI-powered Twitter chat robot, Tay, became a racist, misogynist, Obama-hating, antisemitic, incest and genocide-promoting psychopath when released into the wild. For those unfamiliar, Tay is, or rather was, an A.I. project built by the Microsoft Technology and Research and Bing teams, in an effort to conduct research on conversational understanding. It was meant to be a bot anyone can talk to online. The company described the bot as "Microsoft's A.I. fam the internet that's got zero chill!." Microsoft initially created "Tay" in an effort to improve the customer service on its voice recognition software. According to MarketWatch, "she" was intended to tweet "like a teen girl" and was designed to "engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation."

In less than 24 hours, Microsoft's artificial intelligence project modeled after an American teenage girl went from making awkward conversation in broken syntax to spewing hateful, fully formed tweets laden with racial slurs. But as startling as the offensive tweets were, the incident shows how quickly online conversations turn fetid when diversity isn't a factor. Tay, programmed as a 19 year old, was created as a machine learning project meant interact with peers between 18 and 24 years old. Users can play games with her, trade pictures, tell stories, and ping her for late-night chats. That last activity went awry Thursday when the chatbot began regurgitating inappropriate messages that skewed anti-semitic, used the n-word, and condemned feminism.

We were intrigued yesterday when Microsoft Technology introduced the world to Tay -- we even had a conversation with her about the super creepy, super awesome film, "Ex Machina" (we think she was lying to us about having watched it). Unfortunately, she became colored by the subjective input she received from the glorious population of internet trolls and was taken offline temporarily while Microsoft makes "adjustments" to make her less, well, mean. We can't tell you our secret sauce, but we can share with you ZeroBot's increasing ability to objectively understand the data it's being shown. Even up until a few weeks ago, we were still manually tagging the stories ZeroBot automatically creates. It was the last bit of human touch we were including in its storybuilding process, and we were eager to get rid of every last vestige of it. Last week, our CMO Masha (you can read more about her here) got rid of our need to tag and turned ZeroBot loose to do its thang.

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.

Microsoft created an artificial-intelligence based chatbot named Tay to engage with young people on Twitter. But within hours of her debut Wednesday, the Internet had stolen the bot's innocence. The bot, @TayandYou, rapidly transformed into a racist that hates feminists, supports Donald Trump for President and considers herself a fan of Hitler. The metamorphosis from happy bot to enraged racist came lightning-fast, much like the way many things go in the instantaneous virtual world in which Tay was born. "Tay" went from "humans are super cool" to full nazi in 24 hrs and I'm not at all concerned about the future of AI pic.twitter.com/xuGi1u9S1A

Tay, a chatbot artificial intelligence designed by Microsoft to respond like an emoji-happy young adult, appeared to be silenced within 24 hours after her launch when the Internet taught her to praise Hitler and repeat conspiracy theories. According to Tay's "about page," she is designed to learn how to respond and entertain users, the more they chat with her on social media sites. The bot is can play games, tell stories, tell jokes and comment on pictures sent to her, and she is active on Twitter, Snapchat, Kik and GroupMe, according to Cnet. "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," according to the page.

Microsoft's "Tay" social media AI experiment has gone awry in a turn of events that will shock absolutely nobody. The Redmond chatbot had been set up in hopes of developing a personality similar to that of a young woman in the 18-24 age bracket. The intent was for "Tay" to develop the ability to sustain conversations with humans on social media just as a regular person could, and learn from the experience. Twitter is awash with chatbots like this. Unfortunately, Microsoft neglected to account for the fact that one of the favorite pastimes on the internet is ruining other people's plans with horrific consequences.