Microsoft's Twitter Bot Quickly Became Racist

 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/25/technology/microsoft-created-a-twitter-bot-to-learn-from-users-it-quickly-became-a-racist-jerk.html?smprod=nytcore-iphone&smid=nytcore-iphone-share&_r=0

A Microsoft "social and cultural" experiment went horribly wrong and was halted after less than a day and a number of wildly offensive tweets.

Under 24 hours after the bot, @TayandYou, went online Wednesday, Microsoft halted posting from the account and deleted several of its most obscene statements.   The account, an automated application of artificial intelligence, was designed to mimic the language of those who interacted with it.

Targeted at 18- to 24-year-olds in the United States and developed by a staff that included improvisational comedians, the bot disputed the existence of the Holocaust, referred to women and minorities in "unpublishable" terms and advocated genocide.

Some of the tweets were sent after users commanded the bot to repeat their own statements, but some seem to have been independently generated.  For example, it responded to a question about whether the British actor Ricky Gervais is an atheist by saying: “ricky gervais learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism.”