You might need to clarify what you mean - I'm confused. What you're discussing doesn't seem grounded in modern ML/AI and seems to be comparing Tay to how humans

You might need to clarify what you mean - I'm confused. What you're discussing doesn't seem grounded in modern ML/AI and seems to be comparing Tay to how humans learn? Almost none of the modern machine learning algorithms "increment a counter in a database". Those which do, primarily instance based lazy learning like k-nearest neighbours, aren't learning in the sense that is exciting for modern systems. If you're referring to a nearest neighbours style algorithm, then we've had that tech for years and I'd not note it as a modern chat bot. If that is the case, it's even more unforgivable that Microsoft didn't consider it could start spouting back garbage given there's a lot of historical precedent. For such kNN based systems, the only knowledge it has is explicitly the training data, which means it needs to be well curated. Given there's no proper learning going on, we'd be back to a storm in a teacup.