Tricked by a Crazy Nazi Sex Robot
You thought Microsoft’s racist Artificial Intelligence Bot, TayTweets, was stupid? Turns out, her design could be more intelligent than you.
Laughter filled Twitter and poured over onto the rest of the Internet this weekend as TayTweets, an artificial intelligence (AI) Bot malfunctioned causing shock, fear and hilarity. Instead of spreading cheery lighthearted messages, as she was apparently designed to, she became a scary advocate for genocide, racism, anti-Semitism and, maybe even, rampant sex-positivism.
“FUCK MY ROBOT PUSSY DADDY I’M SUCH A BAD NAUGHTY ROBOT” — TayTweets, March 2016
It really wasn’t a good weekend for Microsoft. An established tech giant, one of the world’s biggest investors in research and development, having spent crazy amounts of money trying to keep ahead of new trends in everything from virtual reality to communications to, in this case, AI, tried to show off its shiny new toy on Twitter, and it backfired horrendously. And all this just before their big announcement of tons of new AI software being made available on multiple platforms, like Skype, Outlook and Slack.
Wait a minute.
Let’s think about that again.
One of the largest tech companies, with one of the biggest R&D budgets in the world, put a fairly unsophisticated, and certainly malleable, AI Bot on Twitter, a social media platform not exactly known for its charitable membership, and thought “Oh I can’t wait for people to tweet it about flowers, sunshine and everything else that just makes the world a lovely place to live”. All to be done a couple of days after Apple just held an event announcing new products and software and a week before they held a conference in which they would announce a large rollout of new AI technology? Please.
In a world where good news is rarely news, an AI Bot that responded no more excitingly than Siri or Cortana would create about as much excitement for their AI rollout as Apple created when they insisted on infiltrating our iPhones music by U2 (complete with ET phone home recreations).
Microsoft knew exactly what they were doing. Get everyone laughing, sharing, liking, commenting, and most importantly, thinking about AI, and you’ve got a media environment perfect for an announcement of products just like our dear TayTweets (but better).
But wait… wouldn’t that kind of narrative be one of ridicule, skepticism and concern? Wouldn’t everyone just think that if Microsoft can’t even launch an AI on Twitter without it turning into a raunchy teenage Hitler, that new products would be equally as problematic?
Well maybe. Some people might think that, but the kind of people who are, are unlikely to be the developers and techsperts that will be most excited and intrigued by Microsoft’s announcements today. To make sure you grab the attention of that important and select group, you need to make sure that you and your new product are the first thing they see when they log onto their selected source of tech news. That’s exactly what TayTweets did.
And, worst case scenario, what if developers and tech enthusiasts actually think this is the best Microsoft can do when it comes to AI? Well, then they’ve just set a very low bar for when people actually use and play with these new AI Bots that they’ve engineered.
Either way, Microsoft wins.
As a result of this covert strategy, it took almost no time for news about Microsoft’s AI Bot rollout to spread around tech media, causing excitement and curiosity, with people hailing it as the most interesting and exciting development so far of Microsoft’s Build Conference, and even in tech this week.
All that media interest and excitement isn’t just summoned out of thin air. TayTweets did it, and she did it faster than you can say “I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell.”
