MS apologizes for Tay bot's unintended offensive debacle

Microsoft has issued an official apology for Tay, an artificially intelligent chatbot that stirred controversy over extremist and racist comments.

Microsoft’s Corporate Vice President Peter Lee posted an apology titled “Learning from Tay’s introduction” on the company’s official blog on Friday local time. “We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay,” Lee said. “Unfortunately, in the first 24 hours of coming online, a coordinated attack by a subset of people exploited a vulnerability in Tay. Although we had prepared for many types of abuses of the system, we had made a critical oversight for this specific attack."

Tay is now offline and Microsoft plans to focus on upgrading chatbot technologies for some time. “We will take this lesson forward,” Lee said. “Right now, we are hard at work addressing the specific vulnerability that was exposed by the attack on Tay.”

곽도영 now@donga.com