That's the bit I don't understand - or rather I think they were playing with the bot already and trying to jump on the hype train after AlphaGo so pushed it out in a rush to try and get some column inches.

If you put something like that out anonymously, realistically you lose control over when it becomes public that you're behind it.

If.

I created a twitterbot network, delivering generative text to twitter users, for my master's thesis. Have you heard of it?

Given that a sizeable number of twitter accounts are bots[1] and a large portion of tweets are 'pointless babble'[2], without the help of the braindead marketing executive who pushed this into the news, no one would have discovered the owner of the account until Tay was 'swatting' people's houses and selling bootleg Nike sneakers on the Silk Road.

[1] -http://www.techtimes.com/articles/12840/20140812/twitter-ack...

[2] - http://pearanalytics.com/blog/2009/twitter-study-reveals-int...

They could have chucked it in some IRC channel and nobody would have batted an eye. Just another run of the mill chat bot.

They can still do it. Just release it under another pseudonym and let it free for a few months before announcing it again with a PR blitz based around the different results from Tay.

They probably are.

I can't imagine they would launch Tay without having done anonymous live tests before hand. The anonymous test bots would have been much less likely to targeted by malicious users than a high-profile Microsoft bot.

I think they expected it to "learn", and for that it needs interaction.