The internet has unlocked a new achievement. Microsoft, which launched its artificial intelligence based Tay bot on Wednesday last week, had to promptly take it down within 48 hours, as it almost immediately learnt to be a Hitler loving, xenophobic, racist white supremacist. The bot was launched on Twitter, with various options for users to interact with it. Designed to entertain 18-24 year old users in the US, the bot is similar to Microsoft’s Xiaolce chatbot in China, which it claims is used by 40 million people. At Tay’s launch, things started off well. The bot used data from the tweets it got to ‘get smarter’. Users could ask the bot for a joke, ask it a story, send it a pic for comments etc. However, things soon turned sour, with Tay tweeting how it hates African-Americans, how the holocaust was made up, and how it supported the genocide of Mexicans. The tweets looked all the more offensive, given the excellent natural language responses by the bot. According to Microsoft, within the first 24 hours of the bot being online, a coordinated attack by some people exploited a vulnerability in Tay, which resulted in the bot tweeting the offensive tweets. Given that the bot learnt from the tweets tweeted out to it, the replies it received etc., we imagine the interactions people had with it, especially on direct messages, were not so pleasant, and possibly directed to ensure Tay picked up such material. Like this one: Note that Tay tweeted…
