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."

A chatbot developed by Microsoft has gone rogue on Twitter, swearing and making racist remarks and inflammatory political statements. The experimental AI, which learns from conversations, was designed to interact with 18-24-year-olds. Just 24 hours after artificial intelligence Tay was unleashed, Microsoft appeared to be editing some of its more inflammatory comments. The software firm said it was "making some adjustments". "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. We're making some adjustments to Tay," the firm said in a statement.

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.

Less than a day after Microsoft unleashed Tay, its experimental A.I., to social networks including Twitter and Kik, the chatbot's already become a racist jerk you wouldn't ever want to be friends with. Designed by Microsoft Research to better understand how 18- to 24-year-olds speak, Tay has definitely developed a strong personality. Here are some choice tweets showing Tay's dark side (none of which should be taken seriously): Tay sounds like a real racist douchebag at first. But to be fair, it's mostly just repeating what people are tweeting at it. Still, it's an unsettling sign that A.I. can emulate humanity's worst traits.

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's A.I. chatbot rolled out Thursday started out as an innocent, interesting experiment. Then the rest of the Internet showed up. After Twitter users were able to convince Tay, the name of Microsoft's chatbot available via text, Twitter and Kik, to spit out offensive and racist comments, it appears Microsoft is giving it a break. Going offline for a while to absorb it all. Chat soon," reads a statement on the website for Tay.

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.

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Microsoft is battling to control the public relations damage done by its "millennial" chatbot, which turned into a genocide-supporting Nazi less than 24 hours after it was let loose on the internet. The chatbot, named "Tay" (and, as is often the case, gendered female), was designed to have conversations with Twitter users, and learn how to mimic a human by copying their speech patterns. It was supposed to mimic people aged 18–24 but a brush with the dark side of the net, led by emigrants from the notorious 4chan forum, instead taught her to tweet phrases such as "I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell" and "HITLER DID NOTHING WRONG". By 4am on Thursday, just 16 hours after Tay had greeted the world with a tweet reading "hellooooooo w rld!!!" she was turned off – sorry, "went to sleep" – saying goodnight to her followers: "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. We're making some adjustments to Tay," it said.