Microsoft 'deeply sorry' for offensive tweets by its Tay chatbot
Microsoft AI chatbot Tay, launched last week as an experiment to learn how millennials talk, quickly became an embarrassment for the company as it posted racist and offensive tweets and was subsequently pulled offline.
On Friday, Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Research Peter Lee published an apology and an explanation for Tay's misbehavior, saying the company is "deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay."
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Microsoft already runs a similar project in China -- a chatbot called XiaoIce, which is used by more than 40 million people. But that success did not translate well in the U.S.
According to Lee, Tay underwent a lot of testing to make sure something like this wouldn't happen, but a "coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay" within its first 24 hours online.
Lee said the company is addressing the "specific vulnerability" that led to the attack, without going into specifics.
Many of Tay's offensive tweets were mere echoes of what other users said on Twitter (see example below).
However, in some cases Tay appeared to post offensive tweets -- the worst of which are now deleted -- on its own.
"Tay is now offline and 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," wrote Lee.
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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.
