A Look t Some of the Virtual Friends We’ve Made Over the Years (4 of 5)

Apple’s Siri

When Apple’s Siri was introduced in 2011, everybody freaked out because it was apparent nobody had learned any of the lessons from the Terminator movie franchise about robots taking over the world. Think about it: you could now make a phone call with a mere voice command! Of course, what Siri really did was make interactions with a digital entity a normal thing that we do every day. Of course, now Google Assistant has joined the fray, screening phone calls to prevent annoying telemarketers from selling us stuff, and Amazon’s Alexa, who you can order to do stuff to make your smart home do the smart things you need it to do.

Microsoft’s Tay

A collaboration between Microsoft’s Technology and Research and Bing teams, this bot was created as an attempt to research conversational understanding. It backfired spectacularly. It turns out, if you have an AI take its conversational cues from the World Wide Web, and those conversations are full of comments that are hateful, racist, xenophobic, misogynistic and decidedly pro-Hitler, you’ll end up with a bot that says a whole lot of inappropriate stuff. Introduced in 2016, Tay was taken offline later that year for “reprogramming,” but hasn’t been heard from since.