Meet Tay, Microsoft's new artificial intelligence....

[FileTrekker]

So Tay is a new AI that Microsoft has had in China for some time, but just got released for western audiences, and for some reason tries to mimic a teenage girl, aimed at the 18-24 year old user...

...Why? I'm not entirely sure.

You can talk to her on Twitter, Kik and Groupme. Tay is an ?artificial intelligent chat bot ? to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding. Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation. The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you.?

I went to try it out but it's offline at the moment, figures.

Still, without talking to Tay myself, I can't really judge, but uh, yeah. This seems sort of creepy to me...

...I mean, just look at her profile pic....

Spoiler

 

[Zombie_Fish]

Looks like Tay is already taking a break from the Internet: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-35890188

Well, at least they were right about one thing: Tay has got zero chill.

 

[Objectable]

Screw that, where's Milo? Where are you holding him, soft that is Micro! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE WITH OUR CHILD.

 

[Barbas]

Oh that silly Tay, she a busta and such.

 

[FileTrekker]

Is it quite depressing that she managed to become such a disaster so quickly?

Considering, like all bots of this nature, she learns from user input. So humanity taught her to be a Hitler-loving sex robot.

*sigh*

 

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I still hold that the worlds population of assholes are relatively small but disproportionately loud and attention seeking which is why there seems to be more of them whereas the more decent people are less vocal because of humility and all.

 

[Old Father Eternity]

All these things remind me of an old piece of software that could fit on a small floppy. Billy was its name, perhaps not as sophisticated as the ones popular these days but it could get quite creepy indeed.

 

[FileTrekker]

This is the internet so what did you expect? There's plenty of bored losers with nothing worthwhile to do but completely ruin other people's work.

Well, people say 'yeah, internet', but the internet is only the sum of the people using it, so it's still pretty depressing really.

But yeah, not entirely surprising.

Kudos the programmer who forgot to program a bad language filter into a super-high profile Microsoft Garage project, though.

 

[Barbas]

Somewhat interesting side question: when you were learning about IT, how often did you come across references to "webizens"? We've got some old literature in the college library (in the oldest campus) that hasn't been taken out in over a decade, which repeatedly states the value and importance of proper online behaviour and accountability. Whenever I look at social media, I get the distinct impression that a lot of that sort of hopeful thinking went down the toilet like a dead goldfish a while ago.

Every time I talk to Cleverbot, she either bothers me about abusive parents or Jesus.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

This is the internet so what did you expect? There's plenty of bored losers with nothing worthwhile to do but completely ruin other people's work.

Well, people say 'yeah, internet', but the internet is only the sum of the people using it, so it's still pretty depressing really.

But yeah, not entirely surprising.

Kudos the programmer who forgot to program a bad language filter into a super-high profile Microsoft Garage project, though.

I don't think it's really all that surprising, and I don't even mean from a misanthropic point of view. This is basically just a more modern version of when my friends and I were kids and we would type curse words into Simpletext and laugh when the computer would say them. The AI is designed to emulate the things people say to it, so people thought it would be hilarious to make it say incredibly outlandish and offensive things. The fact that it's supposed to be modeled after a kid makes it even more entertaining.

 

[ThatOtherGirl]

This is really a showcase of how incredibly crappy even our best AI's are. The first thing people are going to do to an AI like this is try to break it, and that was laughably easy in this case.

 

[COMaestro]

This is really a showcase of how incredibly crappy even our best AI's are. The first thing people are going to do to an AI like this is try to break it, and that was laughably easy in this case.

Nonsense. The AI was supposed to imitate a teenager. Teenagers typically want to fit in and mold their personality around what is hip and cool. Tay simply took the most prevalent input as the most popular and fit its personality to that. I'd say the AI isn't broken at all and did exactly what it was supposed to do.

The "parents" just found it inappropriate and Tay has been grounded.