Microsoft's Tay And The Future Of AI Articles Innovation

Content-neutral algorithms can be dangerous enough on Twitter, and Microsoft's inability to safeguard the technology against this kind of issue would set off alarm bells in even the most tech-friendly. The mind jumps - irrationally, perhaps - to sci-fi movies in which a robot becomes intelligent enough to become insubordinate and therefore dangerous. We have been, in many ways, programmed to fear such an AI rebellion, with pop culture obsessed for decades with the notion that our machines could one day rise up and rule us. And Microsoft's experiment highlighted something even more revealing - the AI itself is not the danger, it is its misuse. Twitter trolls worked tirelessly to corrupt Tay, and the result was emphatic.