Microsoft Corporation Artificial Intelligence Chatbot goes Haywire on the Internet

The technology giant has addressed this issue of Al chatbat and apologized publicly for its misconduct.

Microsoft’s artificial intelligence powered chatbot, Tay caused some trouble for the technology company earlier last week. The specific bot apparently messages like a teenage girl and last week it posted some offensive content that it learnt from the users. The chatbot Tay turned into a hate-speech propagating, ‘Hitler-sympathizing’ messaging robot instead which seemed offensive to many.

Users exploited the glitch in the system and took advantage of it which in turn portrayed the chatbot as a hate-speech initiator. Tay made this mistake on the micro-blogging website Twitter, Inc. In a blog post, the technology organization released a statement regarding this misconduct on Tay’s part.

Peter Lee, the corporate vice president at Microsoft Corporation, was the author of the specific post in which he expressed that the management of the tech giant was deeply sorry for the ‘unintended offensive and hurtful’ tweets that were made by its AI powered chatbot. Furthermore, he added that the chatbot’s tweet, in any way, did not represent the technology business and neither did it portrays what the company stands for. In addition to that, he even stated that, the conduct by Tay is not how the company designed it.

The chatbot was officially given permission to interact with users online on Wednesday, it’s built to become smarter by interacting with the millennial users and how they talk and interact with each other online. It has the ability to copy how the users type, their ideas and how they conduct speech. However, this ability to learn from the users led the bot to show a slate of anti-Semitic and hateful comments on the social media website; in addition to that other social media networks were involved in this as well including KiK, Snapchat as well as GroupMe.

In counter the reaction that the tweets created on the Internet, the technology giant deleted the tweets and closed down Tay on Thursday. The company has stated that it will be back on only when the engineers have fixed this problem and when they figure out how to avoid such incidents in the future. The engineer’s first task will be to prevent the bot from getting influenced by the users online so that it doesn’t misrepresent the missions and values of the company.

The Chief corporate VP also stated that this problem occurred despite of the engineers testing the artificial intelligent bot in various scenarios. This problem only surfaced after they made the service live on the internet. He added that even though the company tested it with many types of abuses on the system, it had this issue. 

Microsoft Xbox One Loses Its Japanese Market

Microsoft only sold 100 units of Xbox One after E3.

Microsoft Corporation did relatively well in pulling off an exceptional show this year. The company’s Electronic Entertainment Expo (E3) was a major success and many perceive that it was successful in even overtaking Sony Corp. for the very first time since its launch in 2013.

The battle between Sony and Microsoft is nothing unheard of where both the companies are trying their best to reign over the industry. This year too, the E3 showcased this rivalry with ample zeal and enthusiasm.

Microsoft utilized this opportunity to showcase the trailers of its popular video games. these trailers were the expected editions of the famous franchises that were shown parallel to HoloLens- which is a headset, that is aimed to enrich the virtual reality experience.

At this point, Microsoft has several things to be worried about regarding its gaming consoles. The company has not done quite well in Japan, however many expected that the game might change for them after their E3 success. But this is not the case anymore since their gaming console sales in Japan are on their all-time low.

According to the data obtained, Microsoft had been successful in only selling 100 consoles in the Japanese market. This is a very disappointing state for the company since the Japanese population accounts to 120 million where only 100 units were sold despite the hype created by E3.

The staggering performance of Microsoft in the Japanese market is not big news since previously the head of Xbox division in Japan also resigned due to the same issue. Their unit sales performance shows that the company is not even trying to revive its position. The tech giant basically started off with selling around 23,562 units only within four days of its launch. In the third week, it sold 1,314 units only which is down to merely 100 now. Clearly the Japanese market has lost imminent interest in the Xbox One since mostly Asian gamers enjoy Sony’s PlayStation comparatively.

On the other hand, Sony has been doing fairly well in this market where 322,000 units of PlayStation 4 were sold in just a matter of 2 days. This is said to be 15 times more sales than what Microsoft Xbox observed during the same time span. Microsoft at this point needs to take several major steps that can help them to redeem themselves but at this point it seems like a relatively difficult task.