If it stores my nickname and name, why won't it repeat that name back? Ask it what your name is. "What's my name again?" or "What name did I ask you to call me?"
Every single response I got back was, "I have you stored as HUMAN19282301-11. JK LOL I know that you told me."
There was no deviation from that response. Same response every time. To the level of sameness as if I had talked with a chatbot looking for me to watch her 'sup3rhot camsho' and typed the word 'penis' -- "omg r u hard i m wet". Same response. Over. And over. And over.
I get that the method here is to use user-inquiry to overshadow a lack of conversational understanding. Users will always talk about themselves. Hell, humans as a whole will always talk about themselves: to machines, to themselves, and often to pets. So when a partly non sequitur response is given but followed with a composed question -- people can sometimes look past it.
"It just said it was a fish meme but it wants to know how my day was. God my boss is such a dick. Let me tell you about what he did..."
Asking someone a subjective question about themselves is sort of a blindspot in that aspect. That's not like, The Byronic Hero's Law of Talking: it's just an observation in working with similar machine learning conversational mechanisms. I could be way off and it's very much dependent on willingness to play along, ego, and how bad your day actually was. And loneliness but that's a hard variable to map. Hopefully we could call that variable 'cat'.
Either way, I knew what I was getting into. It wasn't a Sea Monkey letdown. I had just hoped that something deemed as ready for a pilot episode in prime time wasn't so ramshackle that it couldn't tell me my name but later went on to drop racial slurs it had learned instead.
This was very clearly an experiment, and I don't think they wanted to pre-train it too much, to see what would happen. I think the results were kinda predictable when people like 4chan get involved! But at almost 100,000 tweets it generated, clearly they got a lot of data to work with for the next version.
The 'learning' indicated, is definitely with regards to language only. They make it clear they're studying "conversational understanding".
But as it only stores the following about users: Nickname •Gender •Favorite food •Zipcode •Relationship status, they've already informed you up front they won't store your height.
Source: https://www.tay.ai/#about