Abstract

The article discusses the case of Microsoft's Twitter chatbot Tay that “turned into a Nazi” after less than 24 hours from its release on the Internet. The first section presents a brief recapitulation of Alan Turing's proposal for a test for artificial intelligence and the way it influenced subsequent discussions in the philosophy of mind. In the second section, I offer a few arguments appealing for caution regarding the identification of an accomplished chatbot as a thinking being. These are motivated principally by Ludwig Wittgenstein's discussions of mind and soul and by some Wittgensteinian philosophers' criticisms of AI endeavours. I will try to show that it is very difficult, if not impossible, to make sense of AIs such as chatbots as thinking beings, rather independently of their technical perfection and accomplishment. In the third section, the case of the “Nazi chatbot” Tay will offer me material for some light to be shed on the peculiar character of our interconnected concepts of thinking, soul and person and on the importance of their further ramified connections.