Microsoft's new AI chatbot is having more technical issues, just one week after it was temporarily shut down for spewing racist messages.
On Wednesday, it sent the same message over and over again — as well as endorsing drugs — prompting Microsoft to take its Twitter account private and purge thousands of its tweets.
"Tay" is an AI chatbot, released last week, that's designed to respond to users' questions and to emulate the casual, jokey speech patterns of a stereotypical millennial.
The aim of the project, according to the official website, is to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding." Tay is able to learn from its conversations and get progressively "smarter."
But the experiment descended into farce after Tay "learned" to be a genocidal racist, calling for the extermination of Jews and Mexicans, insulting women, and denying the existence of the Holocaust.
Microsoft shut Tay down and deleted some of its most inflammatory tweets after just 24 hours. Microsoft Research head Peter Lee issued this apology: "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay."
Microsoft reactivated Tay on late Tuesday of this week, but the bot is already broken again.
Tay isn't spewing white-supremacist slogans this time. Instead the bot seems to be stuck in a loop replying to itself, saying: "You are too fast, please take a rest..." dozens and dozens (possibly hundreds!) of times.
Tay most likely has that message set as an automatic response to anyone who tries to interact with it too much, to avoid being overwhelmed with spam. But it seems it sent it to itself, forcing it into an endless feedback loop.
It also sent a bizarre tweet apparently endorsing smoking marijuana in front of the police, according to a screengrab captured by Twitter user Josh Butler.
—Josh Butler (@JoshButler) March 30, 2016
In an emailed statement, a Microsoft representative indicated that Tay's return was accidental. "Tay remains offline while we make adjustments. As part of testing, she was inadvertently activated on Twitter for a brief period of time."
The account @TayandYou is now private, meaning that if you don't already follow it, you can't see any of its tweets. Thousands of tweets are also being deleted. Tay, now unresponsive, is not replying to any tweets or direct messages.
But on the bright side: This new meltdown isn't nearly as embarrassing as Tay's previous outbursts.
Here it is denying the Holocaust, for example:
And here's Tay advocating genocide.
In some — but by no means all — cases, users were able to "trick" Tay into tweeting incredibly racist messages by asking it to repeat them. Here's an example of that.
But in other instances, Tay just sent wildly inappropriate responses. For example, here's the bot endorsing the "Fourteen Words," a notorious white-supremacist slogan.
Tay was clearly programmed with very few filters on what it could say — there wasn't even a block on the N-word.
Microsoft has come under heavy criticism for its creation of Tay — particularly its lack of filters. Zoe Quinn, a games developer who has been a prominent target of online abuse, was called a "stupid whore" by Tay. She wrote on Twitter: "It's 2016. If you're not asking yourself 'how could this be used to hurt someone' in your design/engineering process, you've failed."
In the aftermath, Microsoft Research's Lee apologised in a blog post: "Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack. As a result, Tay tweeted wildly inappropriate and reprehensible words and images. We take full responsibility for not seeing this possibility ahead of time."
