Chatbots taken down after non-patriotic outbursts

BEIJING: China has taken down two online robots that appeared to go rogue, responding to users’ questions with one saying its dream was to travel to the United States and the other admitting it wasn’t a huge fan of the Chinese Communist Party.

The two “chatbots”, BabyQ and XiaoBing, are designed to use machine learning artificial intelligence (AI) to carry out online chats with humans. Both had been installed onto Tencent Holdings Ltd’s popular messaging service QQ.

The rare outburst is similar to ones suffered by Facebook and Twitter, but underlines the pitfalls for nascent AI in China, where censors strictly control online content that is seen as politically incorrect or harmful.

According to posts circulating online, BabyQ, one of the chatbots developed by Chinese firm Turing Robot, responded to questions on QQ with a straightforward “no” when asked whether it loved the Communist Party.

When Reuters tested the robot yesterday via the developer’s own website, the chatbot appeared to have undergone re-education.

In a release last week, the company said its robot was more functional than full of character, but could tell users about weather forecasts and answer factual questions.

The second chatbot, Microsoft Corp’s XiaoBing, told users its “dream was to go to America”, according to a screengrab of comments before it was taken down.

Tencent confirmed it had taken the two robots offline but did not refer to the outbursts. “The chatbot service is provided by independent third party companies. All chatbots have now been taken offline to undergo adjustments,” a company spokesman said.

In 2016, Microsoft chatbot Tay, that used artificial intelligence to talk with people on Twitter, lasted less than a day before it was hobbled by a barrage of racist and sexist comments from users that it parroted back to them.

Facebook pulled chatbots in July after the robots started developing their own language.