Elon Musk and Stephen Hawking warned us about this. Nobody was harmed -- physically --by Microsoft's MSFT, 0.44% foul-mouthed Twitter chat robot, of course, but what started out as a fun experiment in artificial intelligence turned ugly in a hurry. To some, that doesn't bode well for the future of robot-human relations: Microsoft initially created "Tay" in an effort to improve the customer service on its voice recognition software. "She" was intended to tweet "like a teen girl" and marketed as having "zero chill." Not so sure about the first part, but they definitely nailed the second part. Microsoft said Tay was designed to "engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation."

Two months ago, Stephen Hawking warned humanity that its days may be numbered: the physicist was among over 1,000 artificial intelligence experts who signed an open letter about the weaponization of robots and the ongoing "military artificial intelligence arms race." Overnight we got a vivid example of just how quickly "artificial intelligence" can spiral out of control when Microsoft's AI-powered Twitter chat robot, Tay, became a racist, misogynist, Obama-hating, antisemitic, incest and genocide-promoting psychopath when released into the wild. For those unfamiliar, Tay is, or rather was, an A.I. project built by the Microsoft Technology and Research and Bing teams, in an effort to conduct research on conversational understanding. It was meant to be a bot anyone can talk to online. The company described the bot as "Microsoft's A.I. fam the internet that's got zero chill!." Microsoft initially created "Tay" in an effort to improve the customer service on its voice recognition software. According to MarketWatch, "she" was intended to tweet "like a teen girl" and was designed to "engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation."