As Quinn herself pointed out on Twitter, the big problem here is that Microsoft apparently failed to set up any meaningful filters on what Tay can tell users. It's cool that the AI can learn from people "to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding," but maybe the bot could've been set up with filters that would have prevented it from deploying the n-word or saying that the Holocaust was "made up." Microsoft apparently didn't consider the abuse people suffer online, much as it failed to consider how half-naked dancing women at a press event last week might've been perceived. Then again, if an AI has restraints put into place by people to help code specific behaviors, that kind of defeats the entire purpose of allowing an artificial mind to train itself. It's a sticky wicket that raises ethical questions with broader implications -- maybe a dumb chat bot isn't a huge deal, but when we start talking about software that can similarly ingest data to interact with humans and sway their votes, for example, we've got bigger problems. Of course, we talked with Tay on Kik and found it had problems with pretty simple conversation cues, so maybe we don't need to worry about the robot takeover just yet.