In March 2016, Microsoft launched Tay.AI, a chatbot designed to experiment with conversational understanding through direct engagement with social media users. Marketed as the digital representation of an 18–24-year-old, cis-gendered female, Tay.ai was meant to be chatty, personable, friendly, and innocuous. Hours into launch, however, the chatbot’s mimetic programming structure was taken advantage of by organized groups of online social media users, and Tay.ai began replying to queries with alt-right and neo-Nazi ideology. In this article, I explore the role that Tay.ai’s assigned gender and race played in influencing both Tay.ai’s initial design and, subsequently, the program’s monstrous evolution. This is achieved through three avenues of thought. First, I situate Tay within the new public of Web 2.0, a space reliant on user participation and beholden to the neoliberal, racialized, and gendered architectures that produce it. I then consider Tay as an evolution of the chatbot, arguing that Tay is emblematic of both race and gender as social technologies. Third, I explore Tay’s aberration from programmatic protocols in the context of the monstrous and the abject, suggesting that digital nonhuman ambivalence to programming and encoded control presents a space of productive creativity.

中文翻译：

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Web 2.0 平台上的聊天机器人、性别和种族：Tay.AI 作为可怕的女性气质和卑鄙的白人

2016 年 3 月，微软推出了 Tay.AI，这是一个聊天机器人，旨在通过与社交媒体用户的直接互动来试验对话理解。Tay.ai 作为 18 至 24 岁的顺性别女性的数字代表进行营销，其目的是健谈、风度翩翩、友好和无害。然而，在发布数小时后，有组织的在线社交媒体用户群体利用了聊天机器人的模仿编程结构，Tay.ai 开始用另类右翼和新纳粹意识形态回复查询。在本文中，我探讨了 Tay.ai 指定的性别和种族在影响 Tay.ai 的初始设计以及随后的程序的巨大演变中所起的作用。这是通过三个思路来实现的。首先，我将 Tay 置于 Web 2.0 的新公众中，一个依赖于用户参与的空间，并受制于产生它的新自由主义、种族化和性别化的建筑。然后，我将 Tay 视为聊天机器人的演变，认为 Tay 是种族和性别作为社交技术的象征。第三，我探讨了 Tay 在骇人听闻的背景下对程序协议的反常，这表明数字非人类对编程和编码控制的矛盾心理提供了一个富有成效的创造力空间。