In other words, Tay would be a Twitter representation of the entire internet. Public data that’s been anonymized is Tay’s primary data source. Tay has been built by mining relevant public data and by using AI and editorial developed by a staff including improvisational comedians. In theory, chatting with Tay on Twitter would deepen and widen the vocabulary she had been been programmed with: The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you.

Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation. Tay is an artificial intelligent chat bot developed by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing teams to experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding. According to the official site, Tay was targeted at American 18- to 24-year-olds, 'the dominant users of mobile social chat services in the U.S.': Tay was programmed to edit responses to her on Twitter in order to form new thoughts and sentences. It started, as so many things on the internet do, with optimism, a fresh start, and a tweet:Īnd, as with so many things on the internet, the best of intentions went awry almost immediately. Microsoft had released its latest experiment with artificial intelligence: a Twitter bot named Tay that was designed to research and foster 'conversational understanding.' But Tay learned too much, much too young. So, catastrophic things happened in learning, but not catastrophic learning with the definition of that term.It took less than 24 hours. The comedian dataset compared to a Twitter dataset is also very small in a technical sense, so talking about a mini trend overkilling a megatrend in this case is probably not true, because of amounts of examples available. So, becoming a jerk instead of a nice comedian is a logical direction, where the bot even has to go, at least a little, to communicate on same level, and not alone. So, even humans get on the wrong track there why not a newbie bot? And, with jokes you would probably catch something about language itself, but not about the topics. Discussions are sometimes tough and you easily end up to Social Media Bubbles, where only a certain kind of speaking style and topics is cultivated. Though, the case differs in my eyes from one perspective: if it could only do a few comedy jokes, that probably is not a profound starting point to excel in Twitter.įirstly, Twitter is about real life, not about comedy. Looking at what happened, it was something similar. It seems unlikely that the kind of language it was exposed to was in any way known in advance and part of its training set (and labelled as 'inappropriate').Įssentially, the lesson from this is to never trust any unvetted input data for training, unless you want to risk people abusing this trust as happened in this case. I would think it's just that it was overwhelmed by new data coming in which was different from the pre-set. It's not really an example of catastrophic forgetting for once we don't know how Tay worked internally.

According to the Wikipedia article on the topic, it is not known for sure whether its repeat after me facility was solely at fault, or if there was other behaviour that caused it. Once users became aware of this, they basically gamed the bot by exposing it to inappropriate language, which Tay's algorithms then picked up and repeated. While Tay was initially set up with some conversational ability, it seemed to be programmed to learn from interactions with other users. It was essentially a lack of control over crowd-sourced training data.

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