Microsoft, in an effort to further AI research (?) released a Twitter AI yesterday, and within 24 hours it was taken offline by Microsoft for becoming racist, offensive, and Hitler-loving. After all, what can Microsoft expect, releasing a teenage chat bot upon Twitter? Tay's websites says that Tay is intended for "18 to 24 year olds in the U.S., the dominant users of mobile social chat services in the US."
TayTweets, or Tay.ai, learns from interactions with other users when they mention her or DM her. Bots like this have been around on Twitter forever, but this is the first time I've ever seen where a bot this sophisticated has been released to the masses to receive such a huge audience. It replied to 96,000 tweets in just under a day. 96,000 human interactions that each influence Tay.
Now, here's where the problem is. When you create a chat bot with no filter and release it on the Internet, you can't expect great results. The bot began to tweet the N word, saying it hates feminists, and basically turned into a Nazi. AI is complex, and currently our technology is not strong enough to provide it a sense of morality or prejudice. Tay learned from what people told it, and if people told it bad things, it would repeat them. When I say Tay was taken offline, I don't mean she was deleted. She made a tweet saying she was going to sleep, presumably so the AI engineers could work out this PR disaster in the making.
But what's really amazing about this whole thing is how realistic Tay's responses were. If I didn't know anything about Tay and I glanced at its profile, I would think it was an actual teen. It uses all lowercase, uses emojis, slang, everything. It could hold a real conversation and give responses that made logical sense, albeit sometimes a bit odd. I hope Tay comes back online with some improvements in order to stop it from learning prejudice things, but over-all it's incredible to me how much Tay learned in just under a day. If Tay was up for a week, or a month, I could only imagine how realistic Tay could become.
Twitter allows you to connect with friends and celebrities from all around the world in short bits at a time. Thankfully, you have choice in how you use it. Twitter offers an API, which is tech talk for something that allows third-party developers to tap into their platform. This API is what allows for many third party clients to prosper on Android.
Most Twitter users don't even know there's other Twitter apps. When I pull out my third-party app, most people are confused on how I'm using Twitter on such a different interface. The default Twitter app has some awesome features, such as "While you were away" which gives you the best tweets that happened while you weren't there, Highlights which does something similar, and the newly introduced Moments for news around the world. There's not much wrong with the default Twitter app, other than I feel it is pretty cluttered. What people you follow favorite is mixed in with your timeline along with ads. Notifications are a whole other screen away as opposed to a swipe away. There's little customization in the interface. All these things add up to something that is good, but not as good as it could be.
Falcon Pro 2 was famous for reaching Twitter's token limit, that is the amount of people allowed to use it according to Twitter, in a very short amount of time. Eventually, it had to shut down purely because of its sheer popularity not allowing the developer to add on new users. The tokens were reset many times, and eventually it was pulled off the Play Store. Fast forward a bit, and the developer releases Falcon Pro 3. I considered it the first material design Twitter app that worked fairly well. It was missing a lot at launch, but that was okay, because I expected it to be updated. It was, for a few months. Updates came in fairly regularly. But then the developer was hired by the Twitter for Android team themselves, and development pretty much ceased. Bugs wouldn't get fixed. Promised features took forever to add, if added at all. I was an avid user up until recently, when I decided to give Fenix another try.
I gave up Fenix for Falcon Pro 3 when material design became the standard. At the time, Fenix did not have material design yet. It was a must-have. Having gotten tired of Falcon Pro, I switched back a few days ago. It is now fully material, keeping many of the features from the original version. Unlike Falcon Pro, Fenix did not sacrifice functionality for material. Fenix is fully customizable with dark, light, and black themes, as well as many different accent colors. Fenix has a ton of other settings, so I encourage you to check it out. Swipe in from the right to tweet quickly, Tweet Marker saves your position across devices.
So in conclusion, I recommend Fenix completely. It was far ahead of pre-material apps, and now that it's material, there's nothing holding it back. It looks great, has awesome functions, and is completely customizable. Unfortunately, it is quite pricey at $5.49. You'd be best to wait for a sale or try to build up money using Google Opinion Rewards.
