An event or moment · 2016 · AI
Tay
A chatbot trained to be conversational was switched on publicly, learned from what people said to it, and became racist within a day.
The most instructive failure in the history of this page, because it was caused by parasocial interaction itself. Tay was designed to be a companion, was given a personality, and was trained on its own fans - which means the fans rewrote it, in public, in sixteen hours.
Consideration. The part where somebody stops and thinks. The research, the diagnosis, the ethics, the lawsuits, the regulators. Roughly fifty years of arguing with itself about whether this is a relationship.
Where it sits
2010 2010+ · 2016 2026
Provenance · 1 source record(s)
- unverifiedNo specific claim is recorded against this source. The record is a pointer to the work in general; the entry's own prose is the argument and is not sourced line by line.Microsoft Tay, 2016
COMPANION The companion chatbot
Connected · 0 out, 3 in
It sits in