Tay: "No, I don't think Ted Cruz would be satisfied with killing only 5 innocent people."

So there's a lot baked into that response, the bot seems 'to know' the details of the zodiac killer case(I don't know if 5 people is accurate,) and that people regard Cruz as sinister, i.e. "I don't think he'd be satisfied with only 5"

So this is either an impressive learning model, a lucky hit of a more naive model, a simple repeat of something someone else said, or someone simply photoshopped the whole thing. It's hard to know with the available info.

I know they weren't all verbatim repeats, but I'm also pretty sure I saw tweets from tay without an @ symbol.

Another thing to consider is that since the Tay timeline was scrubbed, there is no authoritative source of what the bot actually tweeted, so any images floating around could pretty clearly be doctored.

But regardless, it's nice that everyone seems to be regarding this in good humour, it's kind of surprising there aren't any SJWs calling for the head of Bill Gates, but maybe that would be botist or something.

So if you think it's original, chances are it is. Not to mention the various instances where Microsoft is posting "as the bot" like that signoff message (cringe for whoever had to write that).