Three lessons from Microsoft's chatbot debacle

You cannot, it appears, afford to ignore Artificial Intelligence (AI) these days. In March, Google Inc.-owned AI firm, DeepMind's computer programme, AlphaGo, beat Go champion, Lee Seedol. And this very year, Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg chatted about building personal AI projects at home while International Business Machines Corp.'s (IBM's) supercomputing engine Watson trended, and other headlines screamed Big Oil tapping into Watson, Big Data for Medicine and Smart Concierge Robots. Not one to be left behind in the AI news race, Microsoft Corp. released its conversational chatbot--Tay, which had learnt about the world from 18–24 year olds on microblogging and chatting sites like Twitter, GroupMe and Kik. However, Tay turned racist and sexist within 24 hours because the people she spoke to, crammed her with hate and anger.