Still, the company is treading carefully. In China, a chatbot called Xiaoice is already “hosting” TV shows and sending chatty shopping tips to convenience store customers. Some are now voice-based, the way Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa are. In the U.S., Tay has been succeeded by a social-bot sister, Zo. Microsoft now deploys far more sophisticated social chatbots around the world, including Ruuh in India, and Rinna in Japan and Indonesia. Today, Horvitz contends, he can “love the example” of Tay-a humbling moment that Microsoft could learn from. In programs that were more rudimentary than Tay, there were usually protocols that blacklisted offensive words, but there were no safeguards to limit the type of data Tay would absorb and build on. The staff quickly determined that basic best practices related to chatbots were overlooked. “When the system went out there, we didn’t plan for how it was going to perform in the open world,” Microsoft’s managing director of research and artificial intelligence, Eric Horvitz, told Fortune in a recent interview.Īfter Tay’s meltdown, Horvitz immediately asked his senior team working on “natural language processing”-the function central to Tay’s conversations-to figure out what went wrong. What was just as striking was that the wrong turn caught Microsoft’s research arm off guard. In less than a day, Tay’s rhetoric went from family-friendly to foulmouthed fewer than 24 hours after her debut, Microsoft took her offline and apologized for the public debacle. Ask her about the Holocaust, and she’d deny it occurred. Quiz her about then-president Obama, and she’d compare him to a monkey. “Ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism,” Tay said, in one tweet that convincingly imitated the defamatory, fake-news spirit of Twitter at its worst. Within hours, Tay began spitting out her own vile lines on Twitter, in full public view. Realizing that Tay would learn and mimic speech from the people she engaged with, malicious pranksters across the web deluged her Twitter feed with racist, homophobic, and otherwise offensive comments. As her promotional material said, “The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you.” In low-stakes form, Tay was supposed to exhibit one of the most important features of true A.I.-the ability to get smarter, more effective, and more helpful over time.īut nobody predicted the attack of the trolls. They’re what u would call my parents.” If someone asked her how her day had been, she could quip, “omg totes exhausted.”īest of all, Tay was supposed to get better at speaking and responding as more people engaged with her. When Twitter users asked Tay who her parents were, she might respond, “Oh a team of scientists in a Microsoft lab. Her creators had even engineered her to talk like a wisecracking teenage girl. She would be able to show a sense of humor, to banter with people like a friend. But rather than simply doling out facts, Tay was engineered to converse in a more sophisticated way-one that had an emotional dimension.
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