The Tay episode proves we're still not ready for true AI

Over the past week much has been made about the launch and (temporary) shutdown of Microsoft's chatbot Tay. For those of you who might not know, Tay is a machine learning project that was launched with the goal of conducting research and development in the field of conversational understanding. It's a bot that can chat with users online, and it has presence over several platforms, including Twitter, GroupMe and Kik. Tay is programmed to mimic the behavior of a young woman, tell jokes and offer comments on pictures, but she's also designed to repeat after users and learn from them in order to respond in personalized ways. Unfortunately, Tay was shut down shortly after her launch because she was found to make racist and offensive comments. Apparently, the quirks in the bot's behavior were capitalized by a subset of users to promote Nazism and attack other Twitter users.