Microsoft apologises for teen AI Tay's behaviour and talks about what went wrong

Peter Lee, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, has issued an apology for the behaviour of Tay, the company's new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot that was unveiled earlier this week. Within 24 hours of going online, Tay was grounded after trolls on Twitter quickly corrupted it into a machine that spewed racist, sexist and xenophobic slurs. "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay," Lee wrote in a blog post. "Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values." Developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams, Tay was created to conduct research on "conversational training."