Op-Ed: How AI's growing influence can make humans less moral

It started out as a social experiment, but it quickly came to a bitter end. Microsoft's chatbot Tay had been trained to have "casual and playful conversations" on Twitter, but once it was deployed, it took only 16 hours before Tay launched into tirades that included racist and misogynistic tweets. As it turned out, Tay was mostly repeating the verbal abuse that humans were spouting at it -- but the outrage that followed centered on the bad influence that Tay had on people who could see its hateful tweets, rather than on the people whose hateful tweets were a bad influence on Tay. As children, we are all taught to be good people. Perhaps even more important, we are taught that bad company can corrupt good character -- and one bad apple can spoil the bunch. Today, we increasingly interact with machines powered by artificial intelligence -- AI-powered smart toys as well as AI-driven social media platforms that affect our preferences.