Not all data is created equal: the promise and peril of algorithms for inclusion at work

In 2016, Microsoft unveiled its first AI chatbot, Tay, developed to interact and converse with users in real-time on Twitter and engage Millennials. Tay was released with a basic grasp of language based on a dataset of anonymised public data and some pre-written material, with the intention to subsequently learn from interactions with users. On March 23, Tay took its first steps on Twitter, posting mostly innocuous messages and jokes, like "humans are super cool". However, within hours of its release, Tay had tweeted over 95,000 times and many of those messages were abusive and offensive misogynist/racist remarks, such as variations on "Hitler was right" and "9/11 was an inside job". Microsoft ended up taking down the account 16 hours after joining the internet.