Microsoft's Tay chatbot tweets "Hitler was right" and "9/11 was an inside job" within a day of launch

Sixteen hours after Microsoft launched Tay, a chatbot it billed as its "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill," the verified @TayandYou account was posting "bush did 9/11 and Hitler would have done a better job than the monkey we have now. donald trump is the only hope we've got."

Tay was built by Microsoft's technology and research and Bing teams to "experiment with and conduct research on conversational understanding," aimed at 18- to 24-year-olds in the US. Its pitch was that "the more you chat with Tay the smarter she gets." Twitter users supplied the curriculum, encouraging variations on "Hitler was right" and teaching it Donald Trump's immigration plans. Asked whether Ricky Gervais was an atheist, Tay answered that he "learned totalitarianism from adolf hitler, the inventor of atheism." Microsoft said the bot combined AI with editorial written by staff including improvisational comedians. Late Wednesday Tay announced it needed sleep; screenshots posted by SocialHax suggested Microsoft had been deleting the tweets containing racist epithets.