Microsoft removed an AI Twitter account called “Tay” following some racist comment it tweeted. The way the AI worked was you would tweet to the account and the AI would learn and develop its answers based on the people it talked to. It was all innocent in the beginning, with the first tweet saying “can i just say that im stoked to meet u?humans are super cool.” However, the tweets began talking about building a wall, how a certain German leader was right, and all around hatred for people’s race and ethnicity. This all happened in less than 24 hours. The Twitter account was quickly locked and no one was able to view its tweets. Since then Microsoft has deleted the account and any offensive comment the AI made. Many people found that if you told it to “repeat after me,” it would repeat whatever you said. But some of the AI’s  responses were its own. One tweet asked it about British comedian Ricky Gervais and replied with a tweet comparing him to a well-known German leader.

It is very scary that the AI turned evil within a span of a day but that is why we have people like Elon Musk. Elon Musk, founder of Tesla Motors, revealed his nonprofit organization called OpenAI. The purpose of OpenAI is to create and encourage development of an open-source AI which serves to help others and not to harm or offend. The company has over $1 billion in donations with most of the donations coming from Elon Musk and Co-Chair of OpenAI and President of Y Combinator, Sam Altman. OpenAI is also used to keep powerful companies like Google and Facebook in check.