The geniuses over at Microsoft created an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot named Tay, supposedly imbued with the personality of an American girl, to “experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding,” with the purpose of “learning” from conversations with social media users to become progressively “smarter.”

@TayandYou known as Tay Tweets on Twitter “learned” that, and other things, within 24 hours of conversations on social media before Microsoft yanked her offLINE to tweak her programming and began the rush to delete her tweets, but many took screenshots before they did.

While many of Tays most offensive comments were the result of the “repeat after me” function, others were the result of what Tay was “taught,” by other social media users, such as the ones shown below:

Via Business Insider:

In one highly publicized tweet, which has since been deleted, Tay said: “bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we’ve got.” In another, responding to a question, she said, “ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism.”

Washington Post highlights Microsoft’s statement: “Unfortunately, within the first 24 hours of coming online, we became aware of a coordinated effort by some users to abuse Tay’s commenting skills to have Tay respond in inappropriate ways. As a result, we have taken Tay offline and are making adjustments.”

According to reports, some of the problems stemmed from users from 4chan and 8chan deciding to have a little fun with Tay.

AI COULD END HUMANITY

While Tay is simply a chatbox and isn’t capable of of physically harming anyone, this incident gives us a much better understanding of why people like Stephen Hawking, one of world’s most renowned living physicists, has warned that Artificial Intelligence could very well end humanity, with others like Elon Musk comparing AI to “summoning the demon.” SOURCE