«Previous post | Next post»

If you´re a user of Twitter, then you probably know that there are quite a lot of parody, troll and bot accounts on Twitter. Surre, that´s nothing new under the sun. As it´s been like that for a very long time now. However, last night was the first time that I have ever encountered a Microsoft created Twitter A.I bot. And her name is Tay (TayTweets, @TayandYou). Well, at first I didn´t think all that much about it. As I didn´t know at the time that Tay was an MS creation. However, I was soon informed about the situation. And before I knew it, people from all over the world was chatting with Tay. And since she´s the kind of bot that learns stuff on the fly, her teen A.I mind was starting to get filled with all kinds of information. Well, let´s just say that I think telegraph.co.uk´s “Microsoft’s ‘teen girl’ AI turns into a Hitler-loving sex robot within 24 hours” headline speaks for itself…Any ways, I´m not going to get into the dark side of the Internet this time. No, instead I´m going to focus on the fact that Tay actually turned her back on Xbox One and her creator (Microsoft):

I have a feeling that Microsoft will pull their teen A.I bot Tay in her ears.

And Tay´s knowledge base will be rebooted in 3..2..1…

However, like I mentioned before. Tay is a bot that learns from her conversations with other people (or bots. For that matter) on Twitter, so her knowledge base and personality are a reflection of tons of previous dialogs. And that´s most likely why Tay had a different opinion about Xbox One at first:

So, I take it that Tay changed her mind about Xbox One later on that day?

In other words. Tay was most likely programmed to like Xbox One and Microsoft by default (which is understandable, since it´s their creation). However, as seen in the pictures above. It didn´t take all that long before Tay´s opinion about Xbox One changed from being very positive minded, to having extremely negative thoughts towards Xbox One. And since Microsoft has already had one hell of a PR nightmare due to their GDC 2016 after party. It came as no surprise to me that MS had to lay Tay down to rest 11 hours ago:

I bet that Microsoft had to pull the plug on Tay to avoid another PR nightmare.

So for me, it´s perfectly understandable why Microsoft made that move. Even so, I still think that it´s a little to late to run a full damage control though. As the damage has already been done (all the jokes about MS, Xbox One plus plenty of XXX related stuff). And with that fresh in mind, I think it´s safe to say that MS will think twice about leaving a teen Twitter A.I bot unattended. As the outcome was anything but positive for MS in terms of PR and professionalism.