Microsoft’s chatbot Tay launches spam attack on followers after accidental activation

After about a week of being shut down for spewing racist and sexist comments on Twitter, Microsoft Corp's artificial intelligence 'chatbot' Tay was on Twitter yesterday for a short time, during which, it launched a spam attack on its followers.

The incident has caused considerable embarrassment for Microsoft as it tried to forge ahead of Alphabet Inc's Google, Facebook Inc and other tech firms in the race to create virtual agents, capable of interacting with people and learning from them.

The TayTweets (@TayandYou) Twitter handle was made private and the chatbot stopped responding to comments last morning after it sent the same tweet to many users.

"You are too fast, please take a rest...," tweeted Tay to hundreds of Twitter profiles, screen images published by technology news website The Verge showed.

The chatbot further tweeted it was "smoking kush," a nickname for marijuana, in front of the police, according to UK newspaper, The Guardian.

Microsoft said yesterday that Tay's Twitter account was accidentally turned back on even as the company was fixing the problems that came to light last week.

"Tay remains offline while we make adjustments," a Microsoft representative said in an email. "As part of testing, she was inadvertently activated on Twitter for a brief period of time."

Meanwhile, envisaging a technological future where computers could learn human language and have conversations with people, Microsoft chief Satya Nadella said, companies needed to build "respectful" technology which got the best of humanity and not the worst.

"We want to take the power of human language and apply it more pervasively to all of the computing interface and interactions," Nadella said yesterday in his keynote address to thousands of developers at Microsoft's annual Build 2016 conference in San Francisco.

"To do that you have to infuse (intelligence) into the computers around us, you have to bring forth these technologies of artificial intelligence in machine learning so that we can teach computers to learn the human language, have conversational understanding, teach them about the broad contexts of personal preferences and knowledge so that they can help you with your everyday task," Nadella, 48, said.