Tech giant Microsoft has issued a public apology after its AI chatbot Tay made offensive and racist posts on Twitter. The chatbot was subsequently pulled offline following the unfortunate event.

In a statement published on Microsoft's official blog, Microsoft research corporate vice president Peter Lee wrote, "We are deeply sorry for the unintended offensive and hurtful tweets from Tay, which do not represent who we are or what we stand for, nor how we designed Tay."

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Microsoft had ran a similar project in China with a chatbot called Xiaolce. Unlike what happened with it counterpart in the United States, Xiaolce was successful in the sense that it was used by more than 40 million people during its whole duration.

Lee said that Tay underwent several testing procedures in order to make sure that something like what recently transpired would not happen. However, he added that coordinated attacks launched by an unnamed group of people, who exploited some vulnerabilities of the chatbot, eventually turned it into a racist and a bigot. The whole exploitation progression allegedly occurred within the first 24 hours after Tay was launched.

In Microsoft's defense, Tay did not deliberately tweeted all the racist and offensive comments. What many tech experts noticed is that several of Tay's offensive tweets were actually variations of what other users said on Twitter. However, there are a handful of cases where Tay appeared to have posted the offensive tweets on its own. All of the offensive tweets posted by the chatbot have been removed.

What many tech experts agree is that a deeper problem on Tay's system can be traced back to the machine learning platform on which it operates. That platform itself does not really know what it is talking about and as a result it posts mixed messages, according to Ars Technica.

TagsMicrosoft, Chatbot, Microsoft Tay, Chatbot Tay, Tay, Microsoft Tay chatbot, Chatbot Tay