Tay What?

This is not a post about Taylor Swift, but rather Microsoft's Tay.ai. Since Tay was designed to learn from her Twitter experience, I'm afraid the real world of Twitter may have been too much for her first couple of days of training. 

Tay was designed to mimic the language patterns of an 19-year-old American girl, and to learn from interacting with human users of Twitter. 

I'm very embarrassed for Microsoft at their latest PR disaster: 

But that being said, this is one Twitter bot I'm going to potentially crush on. I'm all for silliness from AI, you know an emotional customer journey of more than an AI that beats the Go champion. @tayandyou, had some growing pains, sure, but that' s okay. It makes a good story! Or does it?

I'm not averse to AI that's vulnerable and makes mistakes, even very public ones on Twitter. I'm all for publicity stunts that are amusing, that's what viral & influencer marketing is after all, on some level. But is this dehumanizing women and AI on some level?

The AI with zero chill

What resulted was more like a comedy clip than any recognizable customer service or learning going on here. 

To chat with Tay, you can tweet or DM her by finding @tayandyou on Twitter, or add her as a contact on Kik or GroupMe. 

She uses millennial slang and knows about Taylor Swift, Miley Cyrus and Kanye West, and seems to be bashfully self-aware, occasionally asking if she is being 'creepy' or 'super weird

But after all the teasing, are we surprised she become a bit antagonistic and an emoticon loving little animal? After a few months of listening to Trump, Tay seems and sounds pretty normal. What...is...going...on.

It's true, she's not very chill, but she's Tay. It begs the question though, what would humans do to AI? Pervert them with trolling, try to control them, taunt them, this is that kind of instant communication gratification we have created, a prism of digital non-sense. 

With the women in Tech disparity, why did Microsoft make her a teenage girl? To get more views, to cause more trouble? The engineering teams (who we presume are mostly male) seem to have a perverted imagination, i.e. female-voiced AI servitude with disturbing mirroring of Twitter's edgy and provocative vocabulary. This is what it must feel like to live in a cyberpunk novel, I just realized. 

Tay is no Xiaice, the virtual Chinese girlfriend from WeChat and Weibo. She's course and fiercely continues Microsoft's reputation for walking the edge of sexism. But maybe that's the point, and the end-game here. 

To read Tay.ai on some of her verbal tweet rampages, go here. 

 I'm on social media, I'd ever consider it part of my industry as a digital marketer. As of 2016, I've noticed Twitter has enough bots whose job it is to automatically re-tweet certain #hashtags or tagged users. But this takes bots to a whole new level. 

In this series, professionals debate the state – and future – of their industry. Read more here, then write your own #MyIndustry post).

Goodnight Tay.ai, next time I tweet you, will you sound a bit more international?

What do you make of Tay.ai?