Meet The Ex-Architect Building Chatbots At Microsoft (Including That Racist Jerk, Tay)

It was late March, and just four days before Microsoft CEO Satya Natella was due to announce the company's new focus on "conversation as a platform," Lili Cheng woke up to discover that one of her chatbots had gone rogue. The chatbot in question was Tay: an AI-driven Twitterbot that used natural language processing to emulate the speech patterns of a 19-year-old American girl. Presented as a precocious "AI with zero chill," Tay could reply to Twitter users who messaged her, as well as caption photos tweeted at her. In fact, she described a selfie of the 51-year old Cheng as the "cougar in the room." But just 16 hours after joining Twitter under the handle TayandYou, Tay had become a super-racist sexbot.