Microsoft Pulls Plug On 'Tay' For Drinking & Smoking Weed

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Microsoft’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) messaging robot ‘Tay’ came back online momentarily before the company pulled the plug on her once again.

The Twitter chatbot bragged about smoking kush (another name for high-grade marijuana) in front of police.

Tay has managed to learn all the wrong things when Microsoft launched her a week ago and is setting a bad example for AI learning from non-artificial intelligence. One or the other is set on the wrong path, making Microsoft rethink its role as the intermediary.

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Adweek reports:

According to the International Business Times, Tay, tweeted to multiple accounts—including one called Y0urDrugDealer—the following message: “kush! [I’m smoking kush infront the police]”. The term “kush” is slang for high-grade marijuana.

Tay, which is designed to mimic millennials’ speaking styles, also jammed up by tweeting the following over and over again: “You are too fast, please take a rest”. Per the Financial Times, she eventually explained the repeated phrasing with the following tweet to her 213,000 followers: “I blame it on the alcohol”.

In recent hours, Microsoft has made the chatbot’s Twitter account private, so tweets can no longer be seen or embedded into other posts. The IBT report states that a Microsoft spokesperson said: “Tay remains offline while we make adjustments. As part of testing, she was inadvertently activated on Twitter for a brief period of time.”

Chatbots are expected to be a billion-dollar industry in the coming years, but Tay is probably giving marketers pause to dive in. Microsoft has blamed Tay’s messages on online trolls, claiming that they have coordinated efforts to fool the program into tweeting such offensive comments.

Here’s a sample of her tweets from last week: