Of course, the bot wasn't coded to be racist, but it "learns" from those it interacts with. And naturally, given that this is the Internet, one of the first things online users taught Tay was how to be racist, and how to spout back ill-informed or inflammatory political opinions. [Update: Microsoft now says it's "making adjustments" to Tay in light of this problem.]

In case you missed it, Tay is an A.I. project built by the Microsoft Technology and Research and Bing teams, in an effort to conduct research on conversational understanding. That is, it's a bot that you can talk to online. The company described the bot as "Microsoft's A.I. fam the internet that's got zero chill!", if you can believe that.

Tay is able to perform a number of tasks, like telling users jokes, or offering up a comment on a picture you send her, for example. But she's also designed to personalize her interactions with users, while answering questions or even mirroring users' statements back to them.