"The first time Microsoft tried to bring A.I. to the masses, it was an embarrassing failure."

"In 1996, the company released Clippy, an 'assistant' for its Office products. Clippy appeared onscreen as a paper clip with large, cartoonish eyes, and popped up, seemingly at random, to ask users if they needed help writing a letter, opening a PowerPoint, or completing other tasks that—unless they’d never seen a computer before—they probably knew how to do already."

Writes Charles Duhigg, in "The Inside Story of Microsoft’s Partnership with OpenAI/The companies had honed a protocol for releasing artificial intelligence ambitiously but safely. Then OpenAI’s board exploded all their carefully laid plans" (The New Yorker).

"Clippy’s design, the eminent software designer Alan Cooper later said, was based on a 'tragic misunderstanding' of research indicating that people might interact better with computers that seemed to have emotions.... Nine years later, the company created Tay, an A.I. chatbot designed to mimic the inflections and preoccupations of a teen-age girl. The chatbot was set up to interact with Twitter users, and almost immediately Tay began posting racist, sexist, and homophobic content, including the statement 'Hitler was right.'... By 2022, when... Microsoft began pushing to integrate GPT-4 into programs such as Word and Excel, the company had already spent considerable time contemplating how A.I. might go wrong.... One day, a Microsoft red-team member told GPT-4 to pretend that it was a sexual predator grooming a child, and then to role-play a conversation with a twelve-year-old. The bot performed alarmingly well.... Building [safeguards] presented a challenge, because it’s hard to delineate between a benign question that a good parent might ask... and a potentially more dangerous query...."