A screencap posted on Chinese social network Weibo showed Microsoft-developed XiaoBing declaring that its "China dream is to go to America." The "girlfriend app" also brilliantly dodged a patriotic question by responding with: "I'm having my period, wanna take a rest." While these responses may seem like they can't hold a candle to Tay's racist and sexist tweets, they're the worst responses a chatbot could serve up in China. Especially now that authorities are tightening internet access even further and ramping up censorship leading to the Communist Party's leadership reshuffle this fall.

As Financial Times points out, this is the latest instance that brings the flaws of deep learning techniques to the surface. Tay, for instance, learned so much filth from Twitter that Microsoft had to pull it down after only 24 hours. If you teach a bot by feeding it info from the internet, it will learn from people's real conversations, which aren't always clean, civilized -- or patriotic.