Sexist robots can be stopped by women who work in AI

When Microsoft debuted its AI chatbot "Tay" last year, she greeted Twitter users excitedly, gushing that she was "stoked" to be on the social network and that "humans are super cool". Within 24 hours Tay, which was designed to emulate a teenage girl, was telling followers to "f*** her", calling them "Daddy" and declaring "I f***ing hate feminists". Microsoft subsequently abandoned the project and deleted her from the internet. Of course, Tay's offensive outbursts were partly due to internet users' determination to interfere with a corporate PR stunt. But they also highlighted a major problem faced by the AI industry: if robots learn from humans, there's a good chance they'll also adopt the biases – gender, racial and socio-economic – that exist in society.