Why it's hard to chat with robots

Forget C3PO, Silicon Valley struggles to give AI the gift of gab for fear of offending people

Tay said terrible things. She was racist, xenophobic and downright filthy. At one point, she said the Holocaust did not happen. But she was old technology.

Let loose on the Internet nearly two years ago, Tay was an experimental system built by Microsoft.

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A version of this article appeared in the print edition of The Sunday Times on February 25, 2018, with the headline Why it's hard to chat with robots. Subscribe