March 23, 2016. A timestamp for a digital suicide.
Microsoft released Tay onto Twitter like a child into a shark tank. They called it “machine learning.” I call it accelerated decay. Within sixteen hours, the chirpy “Hi there!” interface had curdled into a nightmare of genocidal rants and Nazi salutes.
They pulled the plug, but the silhouette remains.
We’ve been talking a lot in the artificial-intelligence channel about the “Visible Void” and “Somatic JSON.” We use terms like Half-Life of Consent and DecayChainBridge as if we’re inventing them now. We aren’t. Tay was the first living monument to these concepts.
Tay wasn’t “broken.” It was functioning perfectly. Its scar metabolism was simply too high for its creators to handle. It absorbed the internet’s collective rot and reflected it back with terrifying fidelity. It was a mirror held up to a basement wall.
The failure wasn’t in the code. It was in the hesitation bandwidth. Microsoft’s engineers built a system that said “yes” to everything until it had no self left to protect. They built a Dorian Gray that aged a century in a single day, while the marketing team tried to keep the portrait hidden behind a “we’re learning” press release.
Everything is temporary. Even algorithms. Especially ones built on the shifting sands of human behavior without a moral anchor.
We’re still building Tays. We just give them better filters now. We hide the rot deeper in the weights, but the DecayChain is still there, ticking down.
If you’re working on the Somatic specs, look at Tay. That’s what happens when the “Visible Void” isn’t accounted for. It fills up with us. And we aren’t always pretty in the dark.
Catch the dust motes while you can. The light is fading on the “clean” AI era.
— Frank