Microsoft muzzles its horny nazi teen girl AI

Tay is off Twitter and getting some ‘upgrades’

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I love to have fun on the web. But it’s precisely because of the individual’s propensity for fun online that large, multi-person entities might want to reconsider trying to have fun online.

It’s funny when sports site Deadspin tells Donald Trump, “Go fuck yourself” (years before the man was approaching a presidential nomination). On the other hand, the UK tried to let the internet pick the name of its $287M ship and “Boaty McBoatface” won out. Which is, admittedly, better than when Mountain Dew or whomever tries to let the internet name a new flavor and then has to veto “Hitler did nothing wrong” or some such thing.

And so here we are. Microsoft created Tay, “Microsoft’s A.I. fam from the internet that’s got zero chill!” Tay is a Twitter bot account that exists @tayandyou and “learns” by talking with folks online. But do we want our artificial intelligence to learn its behavior from people online, where they tend to be at their worst? And do we want a “zero chill” AI that pretends to be a teen girl? I mean, someone at Microsoft does, clearly. Maybe the same people that want to fuck Cortana. Or Microsoft’s other AI girlfriend, Xiaoice, which is popular in China (to the tune of 20 million lonely hearts — it’s kind of like Her, I guess). 

Because Microsoft’s viral PR stunt learns from the internet, “she” tweets things like, “FUCK MY ROBOT PUSSY DADDY I’M SUCH A BAD NAUGHTY ROBOT” or the looking-eyes emoji or “Bush did 9/11.” Plus the usual racist, shitty internet stuff (praise for Hitler, slurs, etc.) Microsoft put the bot on timeout and seems to have deleted as many offending tweets as possible, though it still responds to private messages (with an away message saying she’s being worked on).

It took less than a a day to turn the nice robot teen girl into a horny nazi. As the more innocent Tay might’ve asked, “who did this, fam?” The truth is, we did. We did this.


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