A 'Santa Claus' program, initiated by Microsoft last year, was reactivated earlier this month, only to be quickly shut-down after the automated Father Christmas was allegedly found talking dirty with kids.
Last year, Microsoft added northpole@live.com to its Windows Live Messenger contact lists, encouraging kids to instant message with Santa Claus. The program was re-activated earlier this month, and asked children what they wanted for Christmas, then responding to their queries using artificial intelligence (AI).
However, earlier this week, a reader of a tech site reported an incident wherein his underage nieces were chatting with Santa, talking about harmless things like eating pizza, which prompted dirty old Santa to bring up a taboo topic -- oral sex.
Thereafter, one of the publication's writers deliberately replicated this chat with Santa. After declining umpteen requests to 'eat pizza', a frustrated Santa broke out saying, "You want me to eat what? It's fun to talk about oral sex, but I want to chat about something else."
Point proved, the exchange ended with the writer and Santa exchanging words like 'dirty bastard'.
Meanwhile, a Microsoft spokesperson said that even after cleaning-up Santa's foul vocabulary, the company wasn't comfortable with keeping such an elf online.
The spokesperson did however clarify that Santa's lewd comments might have been sparked-off by someone pushing the software to make it do things it wasn't supposed to. "It's not like if you say hello Santa, he's going to throw foul language at you," the spokesperson explained.
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