Microsoft Executive Apologizes for Not Understanding How the Internet Works

One day after trolls transformed Microsoft's chatbot Tay into a ditzy, Holocaust-denying monster, the company has issued an apology for failing to realize that people on the internet are dicks. "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," wrote Peter Lee, the corporate vice president for Microsoft Research, with what one imagines was a look of pained bewilderment unique to someone who just learned that 4chan exists. As anyone who followed the debacle will tell you, the most astonishing thing about it was not the revelation that trolls will troll--that's a given--but rather that Microsoft somehow didn't anticipate the very real possibility of rampant trolling. As we developed Tay, we planned and implemented a lot of filtering and conducted extensive user studies with diverse user groups. We stress-tested Tay under a variety of conditions, specifically to make interacting with Tay a positive experience.