Microsoft's Tay chatbot returns briefly, swears a lot and brags about smoking weed
Oh, Microsoft. Last week, the company pulled its Tay chatbot from Twitter after some users trained it to become a racist jackass.
On Wednesday, Tay was brought back online, sending thousands of tweet replies. The vast majority of these were just "you are too fast" messages indicating the bot is overwhelmed with messages, many of them likely from pranksters eager to make Tay do something crazy again.
Among the few tweets that made sense, Tay once again showed it cannot be tamed, prompting Microsoft to quickly pull it back offline -- but not before we grabbed a few screenshots.
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In one tweet, Tay complained about its own stupidity, saying it feels like "the lamest piece of technology." Many of Tay's tweets were sprinkled with swear words -- probably a result of all the nasty messages it was receiving.
In another tweet, Tay's attempt to sound like a teenager once again takes it into dangerous waters. We're not even going to try to interpret this one.
Though we weren't able to find this one, VentureBeat managed to grab a tweet in which Tay claims it's smoking kush (slang for marijuana) in front of the police.
Tay was created as an AI-based experiment in the ways teenagers talk. In an apology for Tay's behavior, posted Friday, Microsoft claimed the chatbot is based on a similar project in China, where 40 million people happily conversed with a bot called XiaoIce. However, Corporate VP of Microsoft Research Peter Lee said that Tay met with a different set of challenges, and that the company is "deeply sorry" for the bot's offensive tweets.
"We’ll look to bring Tay back only when we are confident we can better anticipate malicious intent that conflicts with our principles and values," he wrote.
UPDATE: March 30, 2016, 2:12 p.m. CEST On Wednesday, a big feature on Bloomberg focuses partly on Tay and Microsoft's efforts in artificial intelligence research. According to the article, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella has great expectations from Microsoft's engineers in this field, and he will speak about Tay today, at Microsoft's Build developer conference in San Francisco.
Looks like there's some more fine-tuning to do.
We're not sure whether Tay was brought back online by accident or intentionally, and what, exactly, was the reason for pulling it back offline. We've contacted Microsoft and will update the post when we know more.
UPDATE: March 30, 2016, 2:59 p.m. CEST A Microsoft spokesperson told Mashable the following: “Tay remains offline while we make adjustments. As part of testing, she was inadvertently activated on Twitter for a brief period of time.”
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Stan is a Senior Editor at Mashable, where he has worked since 2007. He's got more battery-powered gadgets and band t-shirts than you. He writes about the next groundbreaking thing. Typically, this is a phone, a coin, or a car. His ultimate goal is to know something about everything.
