About.me/Azeem AzharAzeem Azhar is the author of a daily AI newsletter. An artificial intelligence (AI) expert has explained what went wrong with Microsoft's new AI chat bot on Wednesday. Microsoft designed "Tay" to respond to users' queries on Twitter with the casual, jokey speech patterns of a stereotypical millennial. But within hours of launching, the'teen girl' AI had turned into a Hitler-loving sex robot, forcing Microsoft to embark on a mass-deleting spree. AI expert Azeem Azhar told Business Insider: "There are a number of precautionary steps they [Microsft] could have taken. It wouldn't have been too hard to create a blacklist of terms; or narrow the scope of replies. They could also have simply manually moderated Tay for the first few days, even if that had meant slower responses."

The bot was designed to learn by talking with real people on Twitter and the messaging apps Kik and GroupMe. But the well-intentioned experiment quickly descended into chaos, racial epithets, and Nazi rhetoric. Tay started out by asserting that "humans are super cool." But the humans it encountered really weren't so cool. And, after less than a day on Twitter, the bot had itself started spouting racist, sexist, anti-Semitic comments.

Twitter trolling proves why netizens can't have nice things Getting a computer to say things it shouldn't is practically a tradition, tat'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 yesterday. Tay began as an experiment in artificial intelligence released by Microsoft – a chat bot you can interact with on GroupMe, Kik, and Twitter, and Tay learns from the interactions it has with people. The bot had a quirky penchant for tweeting emoji and using millenial speak – but that quickly turned into a rabid hatefest. The Internet soon discovered you could get Tay to repeat phrases back to you, as Business Insider first reported. Once that happened, the jig was up and another honest effort at good vibes PR was hijacked.

Microsoft is pausing the Twitter account of Tay--a chatbot invented to sound like millennials--after the account sent messages with racist and other offensive statements. The company quickly deleted the tweets but not before internet users captured the messages in screenshots. In a statement to the Washington Post, Microsoft said the Tay account was baited into the questionable remarks by folks hoping to stir controversy. "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 statement said. "As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments."

It's not certain how Microsoft will teach Tay better manners, although it seems like word filters would be a good start. The company tells Business Insider that it's making "adjustments" to curb the AI's "inappropriate" remarks, so it's clearly aware that something has to change in its machine learning algorithms. Frankly, though, this kind of incident isn't a shock -- if we've learned anything in recent years, it's that leaving something completely open to input from the internet is guaranteed to invite abuse. Update: A Microsoft spokesperson has provided the statement that BI received. You can read the whole thing below.

As Quinn herself pointed out on Twitter, the big problem here is that Microsoft apparently failed to set up any meaningful filters on what Tay can tell users. It's cool that the AI can learn from people "to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding," but maybe the bot could've been set up with filters that would have prevented it from deploying the n-word or saying that the Holocaust was "made up." Microsoft apparently didn't consider the abuse people suffer online, much as it failed to consider how half-naked dancing women at a press event last week might've been perceived. Then again, if an AI has restraints put into place by people to help code specific behaviors, that kind of defeats the entire purpose of allowing an artificial mind to train itself. It's a sticky wicket that raises ethical questions with broader implications -- maybe a dumb chat bot isn't a huge deal, but when we start talking about software that can similarly ingest data to interact with humans and sway their votes, for example, we've got bigger problems. Of course, we talked with Tay on Kik and found it had problems with pretty simple conversation cues, so maybe we don't need to worry about the robot takeover just yet.

Yesterday, Microsoft launched its latest artificial intelligence (AI) bot named Tay. It is aimed at 18 to-24-year-olds and is designed to improve the firm's understanding of conversational language among young people online. But within hours of it going live, Twitter users took advantage of flaws in Tay's algorithm that meant the AI chatbot responded to certain questions with racist answers. These included the bot using racial slurs, defending white supremacist propaganda, and supporting genocide. Yesterday, Microsoft launched its latest artificial intelligence (AI) bot aimed at 18 to 24-year-olds to improve their understanding of conversational language among young people online.

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.

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.

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