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What happens when you release a chat bot on twitter with the goal of it learning how to behave like all the people online? It becomes a racist asshole.

Twitter taught Microsoft’s AI chatbot to be a racist asshole in less than a day

It took less than 24 hours for Twitter to corrupt an innocent AI chatbot. Yesterday, Microsoft unveiled Tay — a Twitter bot that the company described as an experiment in "conversational understanding." The more you chat with Tay, said Microsoft, the smarter it gets, learning to engage people through "casual and playful conversation."

Unfortunately, the conversations didn't stay playful for long. Pretty soon after Tay launched, people starting tweeting the bot with all sorts of misogynistic, racist, and Donald Trumpist remarks. And Tay — being essentially a robot parrot with an internet connection — started repeating these sentiments back to users, proving correct that old programming adage: flaming garbage pile in, flaming garbage pile out.

Here Are the Microsoft Twitter Bot’s Craziest Racist Rants

Yesterday, Microsoft unleashed Tay, the teen-talking AI chatbot built to mimic and converse with users in real time. Because the world is a terrible place full of shitty people, many of those users took advantage of Tay’s machine learning capabilities and coaxed it into say racist, sexist, and generally awful things.

While things started off innocently enough, Godwin’s Law—an internet rule dictating that an online discussion will inevitably devolve into fights over Adolf Hitler and the Nazis if left for long enough—eventually took hold. Tay quickly began to spout off racist and xenophobic epithets, largely in response to the people who were tweeting at it—the chatbot, after all, takes its conversational cues from the world wide web. Given that the internet is often a massive garbage fire of the worst parts of humanity, it should come as no surprise that Tay began to take on those characteristics.

The very idea of a chat bot shows how stupid social media is. There will never be a purpose in listening to a bot faking being human in order to persuade you to buy some shit or click some link. Eventually all of social media will be bots talking to each other and getting each other to click on ads, just like today almost all trade in the stock market is done by bots against bots.

Still, it is funny that the Internet turned Microsoft's experiment into a hateful little racist in less than 24 hours. It reminds me of Spore. You give people the ability to create any creature they can imagine and what do they do? They build penis monsters.

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It also reminds me of Minecraft. Danish government creates entire country in Minecraft, users promptly blow it up and plant American flag

#politics #scitech