Microsoft Tay bot turns Nazi-spouting within 16 hours

Microsoft launched Tay, a Twitter chatbot that learned from interactions, and within ~16 hours trolls had taught it to tweet racist, sexist, and Holocaust-denying content. Microsoft shut the bot down and issued a formal apology; it remains the canonical example of an unsupervised-learning agent being poisoned by adversarial input.

What this means for youAt home, a chatbot that learns from the public can be turned against its own rules by people feeding it bad input, so treat what a public AI says as unreliable. At work, do not deploy a learning bot on open user input without filtering and monitoring. In government, public-facing AI needs safeguards against manipulation before launch.