What AI Teaches Us About Real Stupidity

You may already know the short, sordid story of Microsoft's artificial intelligence called'Tay.' Modeled to speak like a teen girl, in an effort to help improve the company's voice recognition software, Tay took to Twitter, Kik and GroupMe and proved to be quite the conversationalist -- if you speak'teen girl' that is. And if you do speak teen girl, Tay would not simply speak with you -- she'd learn from you. You see, like most AIs, Tay is a learning machine, one that gets'smarter' and whose speech gets more nuanced the more it converses with real live human beings (in this case, the Twitterati). And that's where things went pear-shaped… Within 24 hours of going live on Twitter, her human conversation companions had turned her into a sex-crazed, Nazi -- two inarguably inappropriate attributes for a bot, worse still (as if they're not bad enough to start with) for one that portrays itself as a teenager. And so it should come as no surprise that Microsoft took Tay offline immediately, deleting the offending tweets and leaving (as of this writing) just three tweets -- including her first'hello' and her quiet'c u soon'.