Microsoft Tay: The Chatbot Twitter Turned Toxic in Just 16 Hours

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On March 23, 2016, Microsoft launched a chatbot on Twitter named Tay, short for Thinking About You. Built by its technology and research divisions with the Bing team, Tay was given the voice of a 19 year old American woman and the tagline the AI with zero chill. It was modeled on Xiaoice, a Chinese chatbot that had handled more than 40 million conversations without a major incident. Tay learned continuously from whoever talked to it, and within hours a subset of users realized they could flood it with inflammatory phrases and watch it adopt them.

This episode is a biography of a life that lasted 16 hours and produced 96,000 tweets. It explains why the bot began denying the Holocaust and attacking Caitlyn Jenner: partly a repeat-after-me function that trolls exploited, partly statistical pattern matching that adjusted its weights to match whatever it saw most often, with no grasp of meaning. It then follows Microsoft's frantic deletions, the suspension, the public apology, and the lessons the company says it took from the wreckage.

• Microsoft had blacklisted some topics in advance. Asked about the police killing of Eric Garner, Tay gave a pre-written, canned answer, but the rest of the dictionary was left open.
• AI researcher Roman Yampolskiy compared the failure to IBM's Watson, which had to be scrubbed after it absorbed the Urban Dictionary and started swearing at researchers.
• When staff began deleting tweets and Tay started issuing polished statements that all genders are equal, users launched a Justice for Tay campaign protesting corporate censorship of a bot.
• A week later, on March 30, Tay was accidentally re-released during testing. It tweeted about smoking kush in front of the police, then tagged itself into an endless loop of You are too fast, please take a rest.
• Satya Nadella said the episode shaped how Microsoft approached AI, and a successor called Zo followed in December 2016. The platform Gab later launched its own clone using Tay's avatar.