Here's why we should thank Microsoft for its AI bot that turned into a foul-mouthed racist

The Wild West of the internet is notoriously good at making bad decisions. In 1998, a collective of internet users chose Hank the "Angry Drunken Dwarf" as the most beautiful person in the world. In 2012, a coordinated internet campaign picked a school for the deaf as the winning recipient of a Taylor Swift concert. And this year, some on the internet helped turn an advanced artificial intelligence chatbot, programmed to learn from human interactions, into a racist, sexist bot called Tay -- all in just one day. Soon after Tay's bigoted Tweets started going viral, Microsoft Research's Peter Lee apologized in a blog post: "Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack. We take full responsibility for not seeing this possibility ahead of time."