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Tay (chatbot)
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Chatbot developed by Microsoft
TayTay's Twitter profile picture<br>DevelopersMicrosoft Research, BingAvailable inEnglishTypeArtificial intelligence chatbotLicenseProprietaryWebsitehttps://tay.ai at the Wayback Machine (archived 2016-03-23)<br>Tay was a chatbot that was originally released by Microsoft Corporation as a Twitter bot on March 23, 2016. It caused subsequent controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, causing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch.[1] According to Microsoft, this was caused by trolls who "attacked" the service as the bot made replies based on its interactions with people on Twitter.[2] It was replaced with Zo.
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Background<br>[edit]
The bot was created by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing divisions,[3] and named "Tay" as an acronym for "thinking about you".[4] Although Microsoft initially released few details about the bot, sources mentioned that it was similar to or based on Xiaoice, a Microsoft project in China.[5] Ars Technica reported that, since late 2014 Xiaoice had had "more than 40 million conversations apparently without major incident".[6] Tay was designed to mimic the language patterns of a 19-year-old American girl, and to learn from interacting with human users of Twitter.[7]
Initial release<br>[edit]
Tay was released on Twitter on March 23, 2016, under the name TayTweets and handle @TayandYou.[8] It was presented as "The AI with zero chill".[9] Tay started replying to other Twitter users, and was also able to caption photos provided to it into a form of Internet memes.[10] Ars Technica reported Tay experiencing topic "blacklisting": Interactions with Tay regarding "certain hot topics such as Eric Garner (killed by New York police in 2014) generate safe, canned answers".[6]
Some Twitter users began tweeting politically incorrect phrases, teaching it inflammatory messages revolving around common themes on the internet, such as "redpilling" and "Gamergate". As a result, the robot began releasing racist and sexist messages in response to other Twitter users.[7] Artificial intelligence researcher Roman Yampolskiy commented that Tay's misbehavior was understandable because it was mimicking the deliberately offensive behavior of other Twitter users, and Microsoft had not given the bot an understanding of inappropriate behavior. He compared the issue to IBM's Watson, which began to use profanity after reading entries from the website Urban Dictionary.[3][11] Many of Tay's inflammatory tweets were a simple exploitation of Tay's "repeat after me" capability.[12] It is not publicly known whether this capability was a built-in feature, or whether it was a learned response or was otherwise an example of complex behavior.[6] However, not all of the inflammatory responses involved the "repeat after me" capability; for example, when asked if the Holocaust had happened, Tay answered "It was made up".[12]
Suspension<br>[edit]
Soon, Microsoft began deleting Tay's inflammatory tweets.[12][13] Abby Ohlheiser of The Washington Post theorized that Tay's research team, including editorial staff, had started to influence or edit Tay's tweets at some point that day, pointing to examples of almost identical replies by Tay, asserting that "Gamer Gate sux. All genders are equal and should be treated fairly."[12] From the same...