Microsoft's Tay chatbot returns briefly, swears a lot and brags about smoking weed
Microsoft's Tay chatbot returns briefly, swears a lot and
brags about smoking weed
BY STAN SCHROEDER March 30, 2016
Oh, Microsoft. Last week, the company pulled its Tay
chatbot from Twitter after some users trained it to become a racist jackass.
On Wednesday, Tay was brought back online, sending
thousands of tweet replies. The vast majority of these were just "you are
too fast" messages indicating the bot is overwhelmed with messages, many
of them likely from pranksters eager to make Tay do something crazy again.
Among the few tweets that made sense, Tay once again
showed it cannot be tamed, prompting Microsoft to quickly pull it back offline
— but not before we grabbed a few screenshots.
In one tweet, Tay complained about its own stupidity,
saying it feels like "the lamest piece of technology." Many of Tay's
tweets were sprinkled with swear words — probably a result of all the nasty
messages it was receiving.
In another tweet, Tay's attempt to sound like a teenager
once again takes it into dangerous waters. We're not even going to try to
interpret this one.
Though we weren't able to find this one, VentureBeat
managed to grab a tweet in which Tay claims it's smoking kush (slang for
marijuana) in front of the police.
Tay was created as an AI-based experiment in the ways
teenagers talk. In an apology for Tay's behavior, posted Friday, Microsoft
claimed the chatbot is based on a similar project in China, where 40 million
people happily conversed with a bot called XiaoIce. However, Corporate VP of
Microsoft Research Peter Lee said that Tay met with a different set of
challenges, and that the company is "deeply sorry" for the bot's
offensive tweets.
"We’ll look to bring Tay back only when we are
confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our
principles and values," he wrote.
UPDATE: March 30, 2016, 2:12 p.m. CEST On Wednesday, a
big feature on Bloomberg focuses partly on Tay and Microsoft's efforts in
artificial intelligence research. According to the article, Microsoft CEO Satya
Nadella has great expectations from Microsoft's engineers in this field, and he
will speak about Tay today, at Microsoft's Build developer conference in San Francisco.
Looks like there's some more fine-tuning to do.
We're not sure whether Tay was brought back online by
accident or intentionally, and what, exactly, was the reason for pulling it
back offline. We've contacted Microsoft and will update the post when we know
more.
UPDATE: March 30, 2016, 2:59 p.m. CEST A Microsoft
spokesperson told Mashable the following: “Tay remains offline while we make
adjustments. As part of testing, she was inadvertently activated on Twitter for
a brief period of time.”
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