Tay Tweets: Microsoft releases software allowing anyone to create AI chatbots, after great success of their own

Microsoft has made the code behind its infamous'Tay' chatbot open source, meaning any developer can now use it to create their very own racist, sexist artificial intelligence. The release is part of the company's new Bot Framework, a toolkit which can be used to create conversational chat programs for a variety of tasks. The framework was announced at the opening event of the Build 2016 developer conference, where Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella heralded bots as the next big platform to be tackled by tech companies. Tay, a Twitter chatbot designed to mimic the online behaviour of a teenage girl, was unveiled last week as a demonstration of what the company's new technology could do. By monitoring what other users said to it, Tay developed an understanding of speech and was able to write new tweets of its own.