Microsoft AI Twitter Bot 'Tay' Returns Briefly To Spam Followers

Microsoft's artificial intelligence experiment known as Tay has, for the second time in less than a week, been silenced, and while the chatbot this time avoided spouting genocidal and racist comments, it has been spamming its 200,000-plus followers with hundreds of similar tweets. Microsoft got into hot water last week when Tay was tricked into making extremely controversial comments, including one that called President Barack Obama a "monkey" and another that denied the Holocaust ever happened. The company was forced to apologize, delete most of the most controversial tweets and take the bot offline. Tay returned on Wednesday, but within hours it was once again silenced by Microsoft, who stopped it from responding to comments and made the account private after it spewed hundreds of similar replies in what appeared to be a glitch in the system. Before Tay began spewing out the Twitter spam, however, the chatbot looked to have returned to make ill-judged comments, including one which admitted to smoking marijuana in front of the police.