Artificial Intelligence has been hogging the limelight recently and Microsoft is rightfully at the epicentre. With Cortana and now Project Oxford, Microsoft has been setting up ways to enable an open source Artificial Intelligence platform, that would empower the otherwise dumb devices. Microsoft hit a home run with Tay, its millennial-mimicking robot, but the glory was short-lived.
Microsoft launches and then kills Twitter AI chatbot Tay
Soon after its launch, the bot ‘Tay’ was fired after it started tweeting abusively, one of the tweet said this “Hitler was right I hate Jews.” The problem seems to be with the very fact that the Robot was granted a read write permission which would make it blurt out anything that others said, all you needed to say is “repeat after me.”
Microsoft has not only switched off the Tay bot but has also made it a point to delete the offensive tweets. It has been speculated that Tay was expected to be quirky with her answers and not all of them were fed to her.
For instance, when Guardian asked, “Is Ricky Gervais atheist.” The bot responded “Ricky Gervais learned totalitarianism from Adolf Hitler, the inventor of atheism.”
The most hilarious bit was when the bot was made to read out a Donald Trump agenda that said “We’re Going to build a wall, And Mexico will pay for it.”
While some of us might perceive this as a funny thing that lasted as long as it could, Microsoft seemed to be trying to get into a spotlight with a loud mouthed teenager with no filter between its brain and mouth. The Redmond giant needs to be cautious while trying to exhibit its path breaking technology as it is quite possible that people might develop a negative perception against the same.
Microsoft has issued a statement trying to explain what happened.
