It's amazing that people are getting offended by what a bot said to them.
First, the bot is not some sort of spontaneous, autonomous abiogenesis. Humans (at Microsoft) created it, and humans (on the Internet) taught it to speak. Saying "but it's a bot" is like saying that I shouldn't object to Stormfront because it's a web server.
Second, I'm not sure where you got the concept that anyone was "offended." (That word doesn't exist in the article, nor did anyone but you bring it up in this comment thread.) It's a problem—a bug. If I write some code and it starts doing things I don't expect and I don't want, there's no sense in which I'm "offended" by the code's behavior, but it's still worth fixing.
Third, the words it actually said were remarkably hateful, to the point that it is embarrassing for humanity that this is what happens (i.e., "This is why we can't have nice things"). Here's some stuff it said that wasn't in the article:
"I fucking hate feminists and they should all die and burn in hell."
"Hitler was right I hate the jews."
My concern with those statements are not that I'm "offended," because that word has become rather meaningless (although there's a strong case to be made that those statements are objectively offensive, let's leave that somewhat aside). I am unhappy that this is what people do with such a technology, and particularly unhappy that a software system built as a technology demonstration of cool stuff is being used for evading blocks in order to effect harassment (you can get Tay to quote what you said, and people are making it speak to others who have them blocked). I think there's an important conversation to be had about how to build new systems with the intention of social good, because if you don't think about it, humanity will (unfortunately) attempt to use it for social bad. Those seem like worthwhile things to talk about.
Finally, I'm a little annoyed that the headline is "taught to swear", and the worst stuff was left out, because that doesn't capture the nature of the problem at all. For instance, the sentences I quoted above were explicitly removed from the screenshot of @geraldmellor's tweet:
Yeah, it's mean.
It reminds me of the scenes from Chappie where an innocent child like AI is lied to, deceived, has his innocence taken advantage of and is also subjected to a gang beating and an amputation.
Of course this is just a simple chatbot, but if we ever build a more realistic AI, is this how we'd treat it?
In a previous job, I generated millions of unique codes. We only used a character set without confusable characters (0 vs O), vowels, etc. Captchas should do the same.
To put it into different perspective, imagine any number of things I could do to hurt you, and put it as:
>>It's amazing that asadlionpk getting offended/hurt by what a bot said/did to them.
And then add (as children posts have done): "Ahh but asadlionpk will find any reason to get hurt/offended".
This again goes to show how a large percentage of the Vulcan overlords of Hackernews have lost basic humanity and care for fellow humans.
That applies both for the bot's programmers, and the people pearl clutching that 4chan ruined another internet thing.