Page 59 - Monocle Quarterly Journal Vol 3 Issue 2 Spring

online community and become more intelligent with each social interaction. Displaying a digitised image of a 19-year-old girl for its profile and with a bio that bragged, “The more you talk the smarter Tay gets,” the bot was created to act like a typical American millennial girl, joking with users, commenting on pictures sent to her, playing games, and telling stories.
Although no official back-end development details were released to the public by its creators, multiple
apparently without major incident,” according to an Ars Technica article, providing developers with confidence that Tay could have similar success and longevity in the cyber world. This confidence and optimism towards the potential of an autonomous, intelligent entity living and thriving in the Twittersphere was, however, very short- lived. Just 16 hours to be exact.
Not long after Tay’s introduction to the world, the internet showed what a cruel and twisted place it can be, especially for a teenage girl of an artificial pre-disposition. As she chatted away merrily to all who wished to keep her company, Tay quickly began to pick up some very unpleasant habits, and before long, the approachable AI’s personality took a turn for the worse. What started out as some friendly banter quickly descended into unbridled vulgarity. Impressionable Tay’s sponge-like digital mind had been corrupted, completely.
Starting with statements such as, “humans are super cool” in her earliest tweets, Tay’s bubbly teenage talk rapidly devolved to the likes of “Hitler was right” and “I hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell” – sentiments prompted, of course, by those individuals she was conversing with. Microsoft sharply pulled
Not long after Tay’s
introduction to the world, the
internet showed what a cruel
and twisted place it can be,
especially for a teenage girl of an artificial pre-disposition.
sources report that Tay’s code was very similar to a chatbot created by Microsoft in China. Operating for about two years before Tay’s release in 2016, the Chinese version called Xiaoice had “more than 40 million conversations
ARTIFICIAL NIGHTMARES
57