If it wasn't already clear that Microsoft learned a few hard lessons after its Tay AI went off the deep end with racist and sexist remarks, it is now. The folks in Redmond have posted reflections on the incident that shed a little more light on both what happened and what the company learned. Believe it or not, Microsoft did stress-test its youth-like code to make sure you had a "positive experience." However, it also admits that it wasn't prepared for what would happen when it exposed Tay to a wider audience. It made a "critical oversight" that didn't account for a dedicated group exploiting a vulnerability in Tay's behavior that would make her repeat all kinds of vile statements.

Following a concerted effort to make a Twitter AI chatbot called Tay say incredibly racist and misogynist things, its creator, Microsoft, has taken it offline for an undetermined amount of time. In the space of just 24 hours, Tay turned from a genderless machine-learning AI designed to learn from Twitter, into a Donald Trump-supporting, holocaust-denying sexist. The Tay account was developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams to learn from 18-24-year-olds – otherwise known as millenials – and, according to Microsoft, "the more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets". As Microsoft should have known, the masses of the internet tend not to play things by the book and, within the space of a few hours, the account with more than 100,000 followers was soon bombarded with vile comments in the hope that Tay would repeat them. No doubt sending Microsoft's PR team into a state of panic, Tay gradually started repeating many of these comments, including such obviously hateful ones as "Hitler did nothing wrong", which, according to The Guardian, was due to an effort led by members from the infamous 4chan forum.