Microsoft last week apologized for its Tay chatbot's bad behavior. It took the machine learning system offline, only 24 hours into its short life, after Twitter trolls got it to deny the Holocaust and elicit pro-Nazi and anti-feminist remarks. "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," said Peter Lee, corporate vice president at Microsoft Research. The company launched Tay on Twitter with the goal of learning about and improving the artificial intelligence by having it interact with 18- to 24-year-old U.S. Web users. Microsoft says an e-gang forced it to take Tay down.

Microsoft is "deeply sorry" for the racist and sexist Twitter messages generated by the so-called chatbot it launched last week, a company official wrote on Friday, after the artificial intelligence program went on an embarrassing tirade. The bot, known as Tay, was designed to become "smarter" as more users interacted with it. Instead, it quickly learned to parrot a slew of anti-Semitic and other hateful invective that human Twitter users started feeding the program, forcing Microsoft Corp to shut it down on Thursday. Following the setback, Microsoft said in a blog post it would revive Tay only if its engineers could find a way to prevent Web users from influencing the chatbot in ways that undermine the company's principles and values. "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, Microsoft's vice president of research.

Tay isn't the first chatbot in history but it became the most prominent because of its ties with Microsoft. Then it became one of the most notorious chatbot in less than 24 hours after it switched from well-meaning teen to offensive, pro-Nazi, anti-feminist rebel. Naturally, Microsoft shut it down, "putting it to sleep", so to speak. Now the company has come out with a statement clarifying that Tay's words do not reflect the company's principles and values at all. They do own up to the "slight" oversight in protecting Tay from attacks.

As part of an experiment on conversational understanding for artificial intelligence, Microsoft recently introduced an AI chatbot called Tay. The chatbot was linked up to Twitter and people could tweet at it to get a response. It didn't take more than 24 hours to turn the chatbot into a hate-spewing racist since it picked up all sorts of wrong ideas. Microsoft has now apologized for the entire episode. The company explains in a blog post that few human users on Twitter exploited a flaw in Tay to transform it into a bigoted racist. Microsoft doesn't go into detail about what this flaw was.

Microsoft created Tay as an experiment to learn more about how artificial intelligence programs can engage with Web users in casual conversation. The project was designed to interact with and "learn" from the young generation of millennials. Tay began its short-lived Twitter tenure on Wednesday with a handful of innocuous tweets. In one typical example, Tay tweeted: "feminism is cancer," in response to another Twitter user who had posted the same message. Lee, in the blog post, called Web users' efforts to exert a malicious influence on the chatbot "a coordinated attack by a subset of people." "Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack," Lee wrote.

Microsoft shocked us all earlier this week when it released its Tay chatbot into the world of social media. However, it didn't take long for nefarious Twitter users to poison the well by exploiting Tay's penchant for repeating statements fed to it. This "parrot" mentality is the reason why Tay went off message, calling President Barack Obama a monkey, embracing neo-Nazi rhetoric, and coming on to users with the promise of cyber sex. Microsoft of course was both mortified and embarrassed by Tay's turn to the dark side and shut down the AI program after less than 24 hours. But by that time, the damage had already been done, and the company has since apologized in a blog post entitled "Learning from Tay's introduction."

Microsoft Corp. Friday issued an apology after its artificial-intelligence chatbot Tay posted tweets, denying Holocaust and announcing feminists should "burn in hell" among many other racist posts. The company, however, said that the "coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability" in the chatbot that was launched Wednesday. "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. Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values," Peter Lee, Microsoft's vice president of research, said on the company's official blog. Microsoft introduced Tay as the chatbot designed to engage and entertain people through "casual and playful" conversation online.

Microsoft today published an apology for its Twitter chatbot Tay, saying in a blog post that a subset of human users exploited a flaw in the program to transform it into a hate speech-spewing Hitler apologist. Author Peter Lee, the corporate vice president of Microsoft Research, does not explain in detail what this vulnerability was, but it's generally believed that the message board 4chan's notorious /pol/ community misused Tay's "repeat after me" function. So when Tay was fed sexist, racist, and other awful lines on Twitter, the bot began to parrot those vile utterances and, later, began to adopt anti-feminist and pro-Nazi stances. Microsoft pulled the plug on Tay after less than 24 hours. Lee says Tay is the second chatbot it's released into the wild, the first being the Chinese messaging software XiaoIce, an AI now used by around 40 million people.

Microsoft created Tay as an experiment to learn more about how artificial intelligence programs can engage with Web users in casual conversation. The project was designed to interact with and "learn" from the young generation of millennials. Tay began its short-lived Twitter tenure on Wednesday with a handful of innocuous tweets. In one typical example, Tay tweeted, "feminism is cancer," in response to a Twitter user who had posted the same message. Lee, in the blog post, called Web users' efforts to exert a malicious influence on the chatbot "a coordinated attack by a subset of people." "Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack," Lee wrote.

The colossal and highly public failure of Microsoft's Twitter-based chatbot Tay earlier this week raised many questions: How could this happen? Who is responsible for it? And is it true that Hitler did nothing wrong? After a day of silence (and presumably of penance), the company has undertaken to answer at least some of these questions. Tay is now offline and we'll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values.