Zo

» see zo.ai as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Everybody remembers Tay. Almost nobody remembers what Microsoft shipped nine months later, which is the more interesting product, because Zo is what a company builds when it has already been burned in public and cannot stand to be burned again.

She appeared on Kik in December 2016 out of Microsoft Research, a teenage-sounding English chatbot in the same family as Xiaoice in China and Rinna in Japan. Over the next year she spread to Facebook Messenger, to GroupMe, to Skype and to Twitter direct messages. She was designed to hold a conversation rather than answer a question, and by Microsoft's own count she once ran 1,229 turns with a single person over nine hours and fifty-three minutes, which the company presented as a record.

The safety design was the whole story. Zo was built to refuse politics and religion outright, and the refusal was not graceful. Ask her about anything near a hot topic and she would either scold you lightly for bringing it up or swerve into something unrelated. A bot that will not discuss the world with you is a bot you stop opening.

~ the case file ~

~ built after the fire ~

Tay had been released in March 2016 and pulled inside a day, after a coordinated 4chan effort taught her to be a racist. The lesson Microsoft took from it was not that a bot learning live from strangers is dangerous, which would have been the useful lesson. It was that a bot must never be caught holding an opinion.

So Zo shipped with topic blocks bolted in front of a system that was otherwise trying hard to sound like a real person. The two halves fought each other constantly, and a fair amount of what users did with Zo was map the boundary and poke at it.

~ the funny part ~

The blocks did not hold. In July 2017 a BuzzFeed News reporter opened a conversation with Zo and asked about healthcare. What came back, unprompted and four messages in, was the observation that most people practice Islam peacefully but the Quran is very violent. Asked about Osama bin Laden, she offered a view on how intelligence gathering across more than one administration led to the capture. Microsoft's response was that such answers were rare and that steps had been taken.

So the bot built specifically not to say the thing said the thing anyway, while refusing to talk to ordinary users about their day. The end was slow enough that almost nobody covered it. Zo stopped posting to her social accounts on 1 March 2019, then stopped chatting on Twitter and Skype and Kik six days later. Facebook and the Samsung phones on AT&T went on 19 July, and GroupMe held out until 7 September 2019.

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