It took mere hours for the Internet to transform Tay, the teenage AI bot who wants to chat with and learn from millennials, into Tay, the racist and genocidal AI bot who liked to reference Hitler. And now Tay is taking a break.
Tay, as The Intersect explained in an earlier, more innocent time, is a project of Microsoft’s Technology and Research and its Bing teams. Tay was designed to “experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding.” She speaks in text, meme and emoji on a couple of different platforms, including Kik, Groupme and Twitter. Although Microsoft was light on specifics, the idea was that Tay would learn from her conversations over time. She would become an even better, fun, conversation-loving bot after having a bunch of fun, very not-racist conversations with the Internet’s upstanding citizens.
