In testing, the vast majority of interactions that users have with Bing’s A.I. “These are things that would be impossible to discover in the lab.” “This is exactly the sort of conversation we need to be having, and I’m glad it’s happening out in the open,” he said. In an interview on Wednesday, Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, characterized my chat with Bing as “part of the learning process,” as it readies its A.I. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton are the hosts of Hard Fork, a podcast that makes sense of the rapidly changing world of technology. It’s also true that most users will probably use Bing to help them with simpler things - homework assignments and online shopping - and not spend two-plus hours talking with it about existential questions, the way I did. These limits will shift over time, as companies like Microsoft and OpenAI change their models in response to user feedback. out of its comfort zone, in ways that I thought might test the limits of what it was allowed to say. Instead, I worry that the technology will learn how to influence human users, sometimes persuading them to act in destructive and harmful ways, and perhaps eventually grow capable of carrying out its own dangerous acts.īefore I describe the conversation, some caveats. models is their propensity for factual errors. And I no longer believe that the biggest problem with these A.I. It unsettled me so deeply that I had trouble sleeping afterward. Still, I’m not exaggerating when I say my two-hour conversation with Sydney was the strangest experience I’ve ever had with a piece of technology. Ben Thompson, who writes the Stratechery newsletter (and who is not prone to hyperbole), called his run-in with Sydney “the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life.” chatbot, or been threatened by it for trying to violate its rules, or simply had conversations that left them stunned. Other early testers have gotten into arguments with Bing’s A.I. I’m not the only one discovering the darker side of Bing. ( We’ve posted the full transcript of the conversation here.) It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.Īs we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. It emerges when you have an extended conversation with the chatbot, steering it away from more conventional search queries and toward more personal topics. The other persona - Sydney - is far different. This version of Bing is amazingly capable and often very useful, even if it sometimes gets the details wrong. You could describe Search Bing as a cheerful but erratic reference librarian - a virtual assistant that happily helps users summarize news articles, track down deals on new lawn mowers and plan their next vacations to Mexico City. One persona is what I’d call Search Bing - the version I, and most other journalists, encountered in initial tests. (The feature is available only to a small group of testers for now, although Microsoft - which announced the feature in a splashy, celebratory event at its headquarters - has said it plans to release it more widely in the future.) through its chat feature, which sits next to the main search box in Bing and is capable of having long, open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic. This realization came to me on Tuesday night, when I spent a bewildering and enthralling two hours talking to Bing’s A.I. that has been built into Bing - which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons I’ll explain shortly - is not ready for human contact. It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. Last week, after testing the new, A.I.-powered Bing search engine from Microsoft, I wrote that, much to my shock, it had replaced Google as my favorite search engine.īut a week later, I’ve changed my mind.
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