Modelling a socialised chatbot using trust development in children: lessons learnt from Tay

Abstract

Abstract In 2016 Microsoft released Tay.ai to the Twittersphere, a conversational chatbot that was intended to act like a millennial girl. However, they ended up taking Tay's account down in less than 24 h because Tay had learnt to tweet racist and sexist statements from its online interactions. Taking inspiration from the theory of morality as cooperation, and the place of trust in the developmental psychology of socialisation, we offer a multidisciplinary and pragmatic approach to build on the lessons learnt from Tay's experiences, to create a chatbot that is more selective in its learning, and thus resistant to becoming immoral the way Tay did.

Keywords

• psychology
• social sciences computing
• software agents
• social networking (online)
• trusted computing