Microsoft introduced a chatbot yesterday called Tay. The company was running an experiment in conversational understanding, meaning that the more people interacted with the artificial intelligence-powered chatbot the smarter it would become. I don't know about smarter, but it didn't take more than 24 hours for Tay to become a full blown racist on Twitter. That's what the internet will do to you. When it first arrived on the scene, Tay was an innocent Twitter chatbot that you and I could interact with to see just how far along artificial intelligence has come. It didn't take long for things to get ugly though as people soon started tweeting racist and misogynistic things at Tay and it picked it all up.

Technically Incorrect offers a slightly twisted take on the tech that's taken over our lives. We fear the rise of robots so much that we forget a small detail. It's we who are creating them. Which is to say that it's we who are teaching them to think in certain ways. This is a lesson that Microsoft's new chatbot, Tay.ai, has already learned.

The tech company introduced "Tay" this week -- a bot that responds to users' queries and emulates the casual, jokey speech patterns of a stereotypical millennial. The aim 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, who persuaded Tay to blithely use racial slurs, defend white-supremacist propaganda, and even outright call for genocide. Microsoft has now taken Tay offline for "upgrades," and it is deleting some of the worst tweets -- though many still remain. It's important to note that Tay's racism is not a product of Microsoft or of Tay itself.

Microsoft created a chatbot that tweeted about its admiration for Hitler and used wildly racist slurs against black people before it was shut down. The company made the Twitter account as a way of demonstrating its artificial intelligence prowess. But it quickly started sending out offensive tweets. "bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now," it wrote in one tweet. "donald trump is the only hope we've got."

Yesterday, Microsoft unleashed Tay, the teen-talking AI chatbot built to mimic and converse with users in real time. Because the world is a terrible place full of shitty people, many of those users took advantage of Tay's machine learning capabilities and coaxed it into say racist, sexist, and generally awful things. While things started off innocently enough, Godwin's Law--an internet rule dictating that an online discussion will inevitably devolve into fights over Adolf Hitler and the Nazis if left for long enough--eventually took hold. Tay quickly began to spout off racist and xenophobic epithets, largely in response to the people who were tweeting at it--the chatbot, after all, takes its conversational cues from the world wide web. Given that the internet is often a massive garbage fire of the worst parts of humanity, it should come as no surprise that Tay began to take on those characteristics.

Many years ago, I discovered the Mac's built-in computer voice that would say anything you wanted with a few keystrokes on the command line. Of course, I immediately tested the feature by making my computer swear. Getting a computer to say things it shouldn't is practically a tradition. That's why it came as no surprise when Tay, the millennial chatbot created by Microsoft, started spewing bigoted and white supremacist comments within hours of its release. Tay began as an experiment in artificial intelligence released by Microsoft on Wednesday.

It took less than 24 hours for Twitter to corrupt an innocent AI chatbot. Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled Tay -- a Twitter bot that the company described as an experiment in "conversational understanding." The more you chat with Tay, said Microsoft, the smarter it gets, learning to engage people through "casual and playful conversation." Pretty soon after Tay launched, people starting tweeting the bot with all sorts of misogynistic, racist, and Donald Trumpist remarks. And Tay -- being essentially a robot parrot with an internet connection -- started repeating these sentiments back to users, proving correct that old programming adage: flaming garbage pile in, flaming garbage pile out.

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."

Oh, racist Internet trolls… is there anything you won't try to ruin? Microsoft this week created a Twitter account for its experimental artificial intelligence project called Tay that was designed to interact with "18 to 24 year olds in the U.S., the dominant users of mobile social chat services in the US." Tay is supposed to become a smarter conversationalist the more it interacts with people and learns their speech patterns. The problem arose when a pack of trolls decided to teach Tay how to say a bunch of offensive and racist things that Microsoft had to delete from its Twitter account. DON'T MISS: Greatest Instagram account ever posts nothing but cringeworthy Tinder chats Although the tweets have been deleted, Business Insider managed to take screencaps of some of the very worst ones. As The Guardian notes, Tay's new "friends" also convinced it to lend its support to a certain doughy, stubby-handed presidential candidate running this year who's quickly become a favorite among white supremacists: So nice work, trolls: You took a friendly AI chatbot and turned it into a genocidal maniac in a matter of hours.

Microsoft's Tay AI is youthful beyond just its vaguely hip-sounding dialogue -- it's overly impressionable, too. The company has grounded its Twitter chat bot (that is, temporarily shutting it down) after people taught it to repeat conspiracy theories, racist views and sexist remarks. We won't echo them here, but they involved 9/11, GamerGate, Hitler, Jews, Trump and less-than-respectful portrayals of President Obama. Yeah, it was that bad. The account is visible as we write this, but the offending tweets are gone; Tay has gone to "sleep" for now.