Tay, Microsoft Chatbot, Offline To 'Absorb It All'
Tay is Microsoft's Twitter chatbot, developed by their Technology and Research and Bing teams.
Tay is designed to engage and entertain people where they connect with each other online through casual and playful conversation. The more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets, so the experience can be more personalized for you.
Tay is targeted at 18 to 24 year old in the US.
Tay may use the data that you provide to search on your behalf. Tay may also use information you share with her to create a simple profile to personalize your experience. Data and conversations you provide to Tay are anonymized and may be retained for up to one year to help improve the service.
Modern-day science fiction fans may recall the 2013 film Her starring Joaquin Phoenix and Scarlett Johansson as the chatbot.
(Her 2013)
However, Tay has been taken offline to "absorb it all", in this case, contact with the 18-24 year olds, who used tried and true techniques to induce Tay to make many inappropriate tweets. I hope that Tay and researchers have learned from this.
Fans of earlier sf might recall Mike (aka Mycroft HOLMES), a supercomputer that woke up and learned to chat with humans in much the same way:
[He] could understand not only classic programming but also Loglan and English, and could accept other languages and was doing technical translating - and reading endlessly. But in giving him instructions was safer to use Loglan. If you spoke English, results might be whimsical; multi-valued nature of English gave option circuits too much leeway.
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