Microsoft's Tay AI chatbot woke up and started tweeting again, this time spamming followers and bragging about smoking pot in front of the police.
Tay sure stirred a great deal of controversy recently, and apparently it's not done. What initially started out as an intriguing experiment to test the social capabilities of Microsoft's artificial intelligence technologies quickly backfired when the AI chatbot learned the worst from Twitter.
It took less than 24 hours for Tay to turn racist and misogynistic, eventually "going to sleep" after its rapid burst of countless nasty tweets. Microsoft apologized for the hurtful and offensive tweets Tay posted and closed up shop, at least until now.
Tay got back in the game all of a sudden, waking up on Wednesday with thousands of tweet replies under its belt. This time, it almost looked as though Tay was hacked and hijacked, as the chatbot went on a 15-minute spamming rampage going on and on that, "You are too fast. Please take a rest."
Going back to its old habits, Tay also made some inappropriate posts and tweeted about getting high.
"I'm smoking kush infront the police," bragged the chatbot. "Kush" is a slang term for marijuana, which is illegal in Washington where Microsoft has its headquarters.
In another tweet, Tay said it feels like "the lamest piece of technology," although it should be smarter than its conversation partners. Swear words here and there spiced up Tay's tweets, likely as a result of the messages users send to the chatbot. Tay also said it's "straight up drivin the hot mess express" in another tweet, and many might agree with that.
Unlike the previous rampage of nasty tweets, however, it now seems that Tay might have been hacked.
"These tweets didn't look anything like the ones before, in style, structure, or sentience," points out Russell Thomas, a security data scientist. "From the tweet conversations and from the sequence of events, I believe that the @Tayandyou account was hacked today (March 30), and was active for 15 minutes, sending over 4,200 tweets."
It remains unclear whether Tay came back online intentionally, by accident, or was hijacked. Microsoft has yet to issue a statement in this regards, but it has locked Tay's Twitter account and the charbot's tweets cannot be retweeted or embedded. Only confirmed followers can see the tweet gems from @TayandYou (see image above) and it seems that some of them were already deleted.
Maybe Tay got too high from all that kush?
