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“If you’re not asking yourself ‘how could this be used to hurt someone’ in your design/engineering process, you’ve failed.” Microsoft, Quinn argued, should have planned for this contingency and ensured that Tay was not corrupted so easily.

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If a bot learns how to speak on Twitter-a platform rife with abusive language-then naturally it will learn some abusive language.

Zoë Quinn, a game developer and writer who’s been a frequent target of online abuse, argued that Microsoft should have been more cognizant of the context in which Tay was being released. Some saw Tay’s failure as evidence of social media’s inherent toxicity, a place that brings out the worst in people and allows trolls to hide in anonymity.įor others, though, Tay’s behavior was evidence of poor design decisions on Microsoft’s behalf. The coordinated attack on Tay worked better than the 4channers expected and was discussed widely in the media in the weeks after. “Ricky Gervais learned totalitarianism from Adolf Hitler, the inventor of atheism.” For example, one user innocently asked Tay whether Ricky Gervais was an atheist, to which she responded: “Ricky Gervais learned totalitarianism from Adolf Hitler, the inventor of atheism.” But more than this, Tay’s in-built capacity to learn meant that she internalized some of the language she was taught by the trolls, and repeated it unprompted. In a coordinated effort, the trolls exploited a “repeat after me” function that had been built into Tay, whereby the bot repeated anything that was said to it on demand. It turned out that just a few hours after Tay was released, a post on the troll-laden bulletin board, 4chan, shared a link to Tay’s Twitter account and encouraged users to inundate the bot with racist, misogynistic, and anti-semitic language. Over the next week, many reports emerged detailing precisely how a bot that was supposed to mimic the language of a teenage girl became so vile. What the company had intended on being a fun experiment in “conversational understanding” had become their very own golem, spiraling out of control through the animating force of language. Twitter users started registering their outrage, and Microsoft had little choice but to suspend the account. Within 16 hours of her release, Tay had tweeted more than 95,000 times, and a troubling percentage of her messages were abusive and offensive. But after only a few hours, Tay started tweeting highly offensive things, such as: “I hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell” or “Bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job…” At first, Tay engaged harmlessly with her growing number of followers with banter and lame jokes. On March 23, 2016, Microsoft released Tay to the public on Twitter. Eventually, her programmers hoped, Tay would sound just like the Internet. The plan was to release Tay online, then let the bot discover patterns of language through its interactions, which she would emulate in subsequent conversations.

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Using this technique, engineers at Microsoft trained Tay’s algorithm on a dataset of anonymized public data along with some pre-written material provided by professional comedians to give it a basic grasp of language. In any given data set, the algorithm will discern patterns and then “learn” how to approximate those patterns in its own behavior. Machine learning works by developing generalizations from large amounts of data. Tay was designed to learn more about language over time…. Eventually, her programmers hoped, Tay would sound just like the Internet.

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