Culture

Microsoft Made An Embarrassing Millennial A.I., Have Signalled The Imminent Apocalypse

Microsoft's A.I. from "the internet that's got zero chill!" KILL IT, KILL IT NOW.

by Sinead Stubbins  24 March 2016

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Aw, jeez. For reasons that sound very shady in their intentions, Microsoft and Bing have today unleashed their Artificial Intelligence program ‘Tay’, which aims to conduct research on “conversational understanding” by engaging with 18 to 24 year old internet users.

As you can imagine, it is apocalyptically terrible and will give you the kind of secondhand embarrassment that makes you want to cut off your own arm 127 Hours-style, because you just want to escape the goddamn hell hole that is old nerds appropriating youth culture in a very superficial and cringeworthy way.

Once I was rustling through an overnight bag in the supermarket, and my undies fell out onto the ground and everyone looked at me, but I was still less embarrassed then than I am now reading these tweets.

ARGH KILL IT, KILL IT NOW!

Tay’s Twitter account proclaims that she’s just an A.I “fam from the internet that’s got zero chill!” and is definitely not a cheap way to gather intel on young people through an elaborate performance of old people faking young people-speak.

According to Microsoft’s website, Tay is apparently just like every other Millennial on the internet (you know how everyone born after 1980 talks the same, right? How we all come from the same cultural experience with the same internet touchstones? #YOLO #DamnDaniel). She uses emojis. She says “wut”. She eschews regular grammar and punctuation for a more hip, visceral take on the English language. She invites you to “put off adulting for a bit” and text her, tweet her, or interact on dead platforms like Kik.

Tay has definitely been interacting with people on Twitter (she’s also strongly encouraging people to DM her which I’m sure is resulting in some pretty creepy exchanges) but apparently she doesn’t have a great filter about retweeting politically incorrect memes.

Ah, okay Tay.

It is unsurprising that Microsoft thinks that appealing to young people is as easy as replying “YASSSS” to a selfie, because the mainstream media in general doesn’t seem to think that Millennials are much more complex than this. Writing thinkpieces about how Millennials are a generation of lazy no-hopers who expect everything to be easy, are the source of all of society’s ills and will cause the eventual downfall of the entire world in a Pompeii-level eruption of stupidity volcanos, is a pretty fucking easy way to make money and attract hate-clicks. The reason that this conversation is boring, aside from the fact that it’s patently untrue, is because it’s just a repetition of the way older generations have always dismissed the generation after them—the Baby Boomers thought that Gen X were a bunch of whingy sad clowns!

In short, I don’t think that it’s an exaggeration to say that Tay will be the downfall of us all and that we all know what happens with robots actually do get woke. The apocalypse is upon us, make peace with your gods.