Google is so nervous about what its newest bot will say, it made the app invitation-only

Google’s latest experimental language chatbot is getting a heavily guarded release.

At its annual I/O conference, Google announced an Android app that will give users access to Google’s latest artificial intelligence (AI) language model—LaMDA 2. The app, called AI Test Kitchen, will be rolling out in the US in the coming months, but not for everyone. After testing with thousands of Googlers, the next step is to open the app up on an invitation-only basis to select academics, researchers, and policymakers.

The hesitance to open the product up to public is understandable. After all, big tech’s experiments with AI tools have drawn flak on several occasions. In 2015, Google’s image tagging algorithm was discovered to be categorizing Black people as “gorillas.” In 2016, Twitter taught Microsoft’s chatbot Tay to be a sex-crazed, neo-Nazi. A second chatbot from Microsoft launched months after Tay’s disastrous debut, Zo, leaned too far into censorship. In 2018, Amazon scrapped an internal AI recruitment tool because it was biased against women.

Read the rest of this story on qz.com. Become a member to get unlimited access to Quartz’s journalism.