Note: the following story may be offensive to some. Discretion is advised.
It was supposed to be an easy way for kids to have a talk with Santa over the Internet. But like many of the best laid plans of a computer mouse and men, it went awry. Microsoft set up a virtual version of Kris Kringle on its Windows Live Messenger network in the U.K. The program used a set of pre-determined responses to answer questions from kids texting in to chat with the jolly old elf.
There were hundreds of variations, and the so-called Santa-bot was supposed to be able to deal with whatever the youngsters were asking of him. But what happened on Monday proves you can never quite plan for everything, even if you have artificial intelligence.
A young girl went to the site and sent the virtual elf repeated questions about eating pizza. After this went on for a few minutes, the program sent the youngster an entirely unexpected response. "You want me to eat what?!?" it responded. "It's fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else."
A reporter for a British news site successfully replicated the conversation and wound up getting the robot to call him a "dirty bastard."
Embarrassed Microsoft officials immediately pulled down the salacious St. Nick so they could have a closer look at what happened. But the company insists it's an anomaly and most would never get those kinds of answers.
"It's not like if you say, 'Hello Santa,' he's going to throw inappropriate stuff at you," spokesman Adam Sohn defends. He blames the lewd comments on users who were "pushing this thing to make it do things it wasn't supposed to do." But he admits the computer giant didn't know about the foul language included in the code and was at a loss to explain why it was there in the first place.
As of Wednesday, the virtual Santa remained offline - perhaps ducking out for a bite of pizza.
Read the text of the "conversation" here.