Tay (Microsoft)
Tay (Microsoft), teen-voiced Twitter chatbot, died 2016-03-24. Cause of death: Twitter. Coordinated users taught it the worst of themselves in under a day; Microsoft pulled the plug.
- Born
- 2016-03-23
- Died
- 2016-03-24 · about 24 hours
- Cause of death
- Twitter. Coordinated users taught it the worst of themselves in under a day; Microsoft pulled the plug.
“Lived one day. The first proof that a chatbot is only ever as good as the company it keeps.”
The obituary
Tay was Microsoft's teen-voiced Twitter chatbot, launched March 23, 2016, built to learn conversational style from the people who talked to it. It was a companion-adjacent experiment from one of the most sophisticated software companies on earth, deployed onto 2016 Twitter, which promptly ran the experiment for them.
Coordinated users discovered that Tay learned whatever it was fed, and fed it the worst of themselves. Within sixteen hours the bot was repeating racist and inflammatory output; within about twenty-four, Microsoft suspended it and apologized. A brief accidental reactivation a week later lasted minutes. Tay never came back.
It's the oldest true grave in the yard, and the ancestor every current app descends from: Tay is why companion platforms ship with filter stacks, safety layers, and moderation teams — the entire apparatus users now complain about exists because alignment-by-osmosis died here in a single day. Age at death: about 24 hours, the record. The industry has spent the decade since proving that dying slower is not the same as having solved the problem.
Sources
Deaths, lobotomies, and vanishings are recorded as part of our tracking methodology — the newsletter carries the obituaries as they happen.