Little Racist, Nazi, Potty Mouth

A review of tay.ai as a new media literary performance.

Microsoft’s Tay, an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot, has been in the news ever since her launch

and almost immediate undoing last month following her vulgar and tasteless tweets. Designed to

mimic a 19 year old girl and learn the content and style of what millennials around her age talked

about on social networks, she existed particularly on Twitter, Kik and GroupMe (Pierson et al.) as

an experiment in conversational understanding. Soon however, the control to her learning was

taken over by internet trolls and Tay turned into a dysfunctional puppet acting on the

instructions of the trolls that trained her. Her culturally insensitive tweets …show more content…
N. Katherine Hayles addresses this exact concern­ of a future in which information loses its body

to machines­ in her book titled “How We Became Posthuman”. Hayles is a postmodern literary

critic, most notable for her contribution to the fields of literature and science, electronic

literature, and American literature (“N. Katherine Hayles”). In a previous book titled “Chaos

Bound” Hayles explains that Science and Literature together help create context for human

I am not arguing that the science of chaos is the originary site from which

chaotics emanates into the culture. Rather, both the literary and scientific

manifestations of chaotics are involved in feedback loops with the culture. They

help to create the context that energizes the questions they ask; at the same time

they also ask questions energized by the context.' (Hayles, “Chaos Bound” 7)

Through her various readings of cultural and literary texts concerned with information

technologies, Hayles, in “How We Became Posthuman”, uses the method of seriation …show more content…
The purpose of this essay therefore is to review Tay as a literary performance rather than an

experiment gone wrong­ a deliberate simulation of media art that illustrates the imperfect, the

incomplete, and the dysfunctional, thus compelling its users to consider a need for human

subjectivity. The project, I believe, does indeed show such deliberacy­ Even before The AI could

be trained to spew hate, her aesthetics implied dysfunction. Her profile picture on every social

network site where she was a ‘user’ was that of a glitchy computer generated graphic, and her

legend read "AI fam from the internet that's got zero chill!"­ Millennial speak for rough and

excitable. Over the course of this essay I will begin with Hayles’ discussion on the Turing test, and

whether or not Tay would pass it, or even if such a test should be considered when viewing Tay as

a form of encoded writing. I will then look at Hayles’ idea of how the posthuman view privileges

information over embodiment and connect it to the idea discussed by Tay’s various internet

critics about Tay needing a system of values (ergo a body) so as to counteract all the teachings