In 2016, Microsoft's chatbot Tay -- designed to pick up its lexicon and syntax from interactions with real people posting comments on Twitter -- was barraged with antisocial ideas and vulgar language. Within a few hours of it landing in bad company, it began parroting the worst of what one might encounter on social media.
Curated from spectrum.ieee.org · 25 November 2019 →
The oldest case on this page and the one everything else rhymes with. Microsoft launched Tay on Twitter on 23 March 2016 as a bot that learned from the people talking to it, and took it down about sixteen hours and 96,000 posts later after a coordinated effort taught it to repeat racist and abusive material. Microsoft apologised, said it had not anticipated the attack, and shipped a successor with far more moderation. Read next to the Grok case nine years later: same instruction to mirror the people it is talking to, same result, and in between, an industry that decided the lesson had been about that particular architecture.
