Tay (chatbot)
chatterbot made by Microsoft
Tay was a chatbot that was originally released by Microsoft Corporation as a Twitter bot on March 23, 2016. It caused controversy when the bot began to post inflammatory and offensive tweets through its Twitter account, causing Microsoft to shut down the service only 16 hours after its launch.
According to Microsoft, this was caused by trolls who "attacked" the service as the bot made replies based on its interactions with people on Twitter. It was replaced with Zo.
Background
The bot was created by Microsoft's Technology and Research and Bing divisions, and named "Tay" as an acronym for "thinking about you". Although Microsoft initially released few details about the bot, sources mentioned that it was similar to or based on Xiaoice, a Microsoft project in China.
Ars Technica reported that, since late 2014 Xiaoice had had "more than 40 million conversations apparently without major incident". Tay was designed to mimic the language patterns of a 19-year-old American girl, and to learn from interacting with human users of Twitter.
Initial release
Tay was released on Twitter on March 23, 2016, under the name TayTweets and handle @TayandYou. It was presented as "The AI with zero chill".
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This entry incorporates text from “Tay (chatbot)” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.