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 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 Inc 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.

In other images of a text conversation online, which Reuters was unable to verify, one user declares: "Long live the Communist Party!" The sharp-tongued bot responds: "Do you think such a corrupt and useless political (system) can live long?"

When Reuters tested the robot on Friday via the developer's own website, the chatbot appeared to have undergone re-education. "How about we change the topic," it replied, when asked several times if it liked the party.

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


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-robots-idUSKBN1AK0G1