Associated Incidents
WHEN TAY MADE HER DEBUT in March 2016, Microsoft had high hopes for the artificial intelligence–powered “social chatbot.” Like the automated, text-based chat programs that many people had already encountered on e-commerce sites and in customer service conversations, Tay could answer written questions; by doing so on Twitter and other social media, she could engage with the masses.
But rather than simply doling out facts, Tay was engineered to converse in a more sophisticated way—one that had an emotional dimension. She would be able to show a sense of humor, to banter with people like a friend. Her creators had even engineered her to talk like a wisecracking teenage girl. When Twitter users asked Tay who her parents were, she might respond, “Oh a team of scientists in a Microsoft lab. They’re what u would call my parents.” If someone asked her how her day had been, she could quip, “omg totes exhausted.”
Best of all, Tay was supposed to get better at speaking and responding as more people engaged with her. As her promotional material said, “The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you.” In low-stakes form, Tay was supposed to exhibit one of the most important features of true A.I.—the ability to get smarter, more effective, and more helpful over time.
But nobody predicted the attack of the trolls.
Realizing that Tay would learn and mimic speech from the people she engaged with, malicious pranksters across the web deluged her Twitter feed with racist, homophobic, and otherwise offensive comments. Within hours, Tay began spitting out her own vile lines on Twitter, in full public view. “Ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism,” Tay said, in one tweet that convincingly imitated the defamatory, fake-news spirit of Twitter at its worst. Quiz her about then-president Obama, and she’d compare him to a monkey. Ask her about the Holocaust, and she’d deny it occurred.
In less than a day, Tay’s rhetoric went from family-friendly to foulmouthed; fewer than 24 hours after her debut, Microsoft took her offline and apologized for the public debacle.
What was just as striking was that the wrong turn caught Microsoft’s research arm off guard. “When the system went out there, we didn’t plan for how it was going to perform in the open world,” Microsoft’s managing director of research and artificial intelligence, Eric Horvitz, told Fortune in a recent interview.
After Tay’s meltdown, Horvitz immediately asked his senior team working on “natural language processing”—the function central to Tay’s conversations—to figure out what went wrong. The staff quickly determined that basic best practices related to chatbots were overlooked. In programs that were more rudimentary than Tay, there were usually protocols that blacklisted offensive words, but there were no safeguards to limit the type of data Tay would absorb and build on.
Today, Horvitz contends, he can “love the example” of Tay—a humbling moment that Microsoft could learn from. Microsoft now deploys far more sophisticated social chatbots around the world, including Ruuh in India, and Rinna in Japan and Indonesia. In the U.S., Tay has been succeeded by a social-bot sister, Zo. Some are now voice-based, the way Apple’s Siri or Amazon’s Alexa are. In China, a chatbot called Xiaoice is already “hosting” TV shows and sending chatty shopping tips to convenience store customers.
Still, the company is treading carefully. It rolls the bots out slowly, Horvitz explains, and closely monitors how they are behaving with the public as they scale. But it’s sobering to realize that, even though A.I. tech has improved exponentially in the intervening two years, the work of policing the bots’ behavior never ends. The company’s staff constantly monitors the dialogue for any changes in its behavior. And those changes keep coming. In its early months, for example, Zo had to be tweaked and tweaked again after separate incidents in which it referred to Microsoft’s flagship Windows software as “spyware” and called the Koran, Islam’s foundational text, “very violent.”
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To be sure, Tay and Zo are not our future robot overlords. They’re relatively primitive programs occupying the parlor-trick end of the research spectrum, cartoon shadows of what A.I. can accomplish. But their flaws highlight both the power and the potential pitfalls of software imbued with even a sliver of artificial intelligence. And they exemplify more insidious dangers that are keeping technologists awake at night, even as the business world prepares to entrust ever more of its future to this revolutionary new technology.
“You get your best practices in place, and hopefully those things will get more and more rare,” Horvitz says. With A.I. rising to the top of every company’s tech wish list, figuring out those practices has never been more urgent.
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