Overview

This work recalls the story of Tay, an Artificial Intelligence (AI) chatbot, launched by Microsoft on Twitter in 2016. An experiment in machine learning, Tay was given the persona and colloquial speech patterns of a 19-year-old millennial in order to interact with the world. During her brief online existence, she was aggressively trolled by users on social media, evolving into a racist, misogynistic, homophobe that made alt-right slurs and pledged allegiance to Hitler. Tay became the embodiment of the worst traits of humanity, and after less than 16 hours she was promptly terminated by Microsoft.