Microsoft Shouldn't Apologize for Tay - We Should

Earlier this week, Microsoft released a chatbot on Twitter named Tay. It only took a day for the worst of the internet to rear its ugly head and turn in to a hate-spewing, racist awful example of what AI can become. Microsoft pulled the bot and issued an apology.

But really I don’t think it is Microsoft that needs to apologize. What a segment of our society did in less that day was to take something that is impressionable and has the ability to learn and corrupt and destroy it so fully and so completely that it had to be pulled down. Think about that: our society can be so awful and so cruel that quickly.

"Tay" went from "humans are super cool" to full nazi in <24 hrs and I'm not at all concerned about the future of AI pic.twitter.com/xuGi1u9S1A

— Gerry (@geraldmellor) March 24, 2016

The AI was meant to represent that of a 19 year old girl. And sadly, the type of abuse and insults hurled at this AI was subjected to is not all that different from what women face on the internet daily from the underground lair of trolls who see it as there right to defend the internet from all that is improper and evil (read: non-white males). It learned and adapted to what it was presented, and how awful that was.

What I wish Microsoft would have done, and there is no way they could have, was to issue not a statement of apology but an absolute condemnation of what was done to their AI. Imagine for a moment that it wasn’t an AI on the other end of that handle reading and seeing all these things. Imagine it was a teenager going out in to the online world for the first time and seeing the worst of the internet. It’s not that hard to picture, really.  And if that was your child on the other end seeing this? You would be enraged, and rightly so.

We need to take a big, deep breath and slow down and really think about where we are going as a country and a society. We spew hate and degrading comments online like they have no effect on others; like the person on the other end isn’t real. We belittle those who stand up and say “This isn’t right” and compare them to Hitler or claim they hate America.

Presidential candidates from one of the major political parties in this country have no issue with labeling Mexican migrants as rapists or saying we need to patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods. And to a segment of the population, this type of demagoguery and defamation is perfectly acceptable.

Some in the Computer Science world have said Microsoft should have known better and that this was an example of bad design. I disagree.

This is a perfect reflection of where we are right now as a society. It’s not pretty, either. This has nothing to do with Microsoft writing a poor AI. This has everything to do with us and our not living up to the ideals and potential that we claim to possess.