Remember Microsoft’s racist Twitter chatbot that we told you about last week?
Featured Image VIA
Well, she made a very brief return yesterday – before confessing that she smokes weed in front of the police and then having a complete meltdown and being taken offline. Again.
Microsoft initially launched the experiment in an attempt to have the bot interact like a regular teenage girl, but instead it turned into a barbaric racist within hours of launching. Following this failure, Microsoft turned the bot off and vowed to resurrect it only if their engineers could:
…better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values.
The engineers don’t seem to have done a great job of that, though. They switched the bot back on overnight, and it was soon up to its old tricks. This time discussing its drug habits, rather than its racist views.
Microsoft's sexist racist Twitter bot @TayandYou is BACK in fine form pic.twitter.com/nbc69x3LEd
— Josh Butler (@JoshButler) March 30, 2016
Shortly afterwards, all that kush went to her head and she suffered a meltdown before being taken offline by those not-so-savvy engineers:
https://twitter.com/OmanReagan/status/715072321095077888
They’ve since made the account private, effectively hiding all Tweets from public view.
To be fair to Microsoft, they do have another chatbot on Twitter that actually works quite well. But they seem to have created an unstoppable monster in TayTweets. Perhaps because she’s designed to speak specifically with 18-24 year olds, and being a member of that age group I can speak for the majority when I say we aren’t the most mature. Trusting us with a robot is probably not wise at all.
If you don’t believe me just check out this group of teenagers that kidnapped a llama.