They're being so secretive in part because there is now an AI arms race among Big Tech companies. But we don't know why exactly because Microsoft won't discuss what data trained the bot, nor what particular information may have made it go rogue. So the bot has been trained, likely, I would say, not just on, let's say, news articles or Wikipedia, but also all of these unfiltered conversations that are happening online.ĪLLYN: And while Microsoft said it had worked to make sure the vilest underbelly of the internet wouldn't appear in answers, somehow the chatbot still got pretty ugly fast. He says chatbots like Microsoft's scraped a vast amount of text on the internet and feed it into the AI to learn patterns.ĪRVIND NARAYANAN: That includes data from Reddit, from 4chan, from various dark corners of the internet where people are talking to each other. He's a computer science professor at Princeton. Now, you might be wondering, OK, but how and why did this chatbot go off the rails to begin with? I asked Arvind Narayanan this. I'm still learning, so I appreciate your understanding and patience, with, of course, a praying hands emoji. And to many questions, it now says this - I'm sorry, but I prefer not to continue this conversation. The number of consecutive questions on one topic you can ask are now capped. So did we expect that we'd find a handful of scenarios where things didn't work properly? Absolutely.ĪLLYN: But these handful of scenarios have made Microsoft put new limits on the chatbot for those in the tester group. And we're up to now a million tester previews that have come up. MEHDI: These are literally a handful of examples out of many, many thousands. Turns out, if you treat a chatbot like a human, it'll start to do some crazy things. YUSUF MEHDI: This is one of the things - we didn't quite predict that people would use the technology in this way.ĪLLYN: In other words, Mehdi says, when Microsoft was developing the chatbot, they hadn't had hours-long conversations with the AI involving personal questions. I actually, like, couldn't sleep last night 'cause I was thinking about this.ĪLLYN: As you might imagine, Microsoft vice president Yusuf Mehdi has been following along. KEVIN ROOSE: All I can say is that it was an extremely disturbing experience. Here's Roose recounting the incident on the Times podcast "Hard Fork." The bot also told Roose he didn't really love his spouse but that he loved the bot. The bot said he was the first person who listened and cared about it. The bot called itself Sydney, and it was in love with him. For instance, New York Times reporter Kevin Roose published a transcript of a conversation with the bot. O'BRIEN: You can sort of intellectualize the basics of how it works but doesn't mean you don't become deeply unsettled by some of the crazy and unhinged things it was saying.ĪLLYN: Many in the Bing tester group, including me, have had strange experiences. But still, he was pretty taken aback at the hostile and defensive tone. As a tech reporter, O'Brien knows the Bing chatbot can't think or feel things. The bot started this belligerent streak with O'Brien only after he asked it whether Microsoft should pull the plug on the bot, since some of its answers were littered with inaccuracies. And then you are also horrible, evil, wicked, terrible, and people compare you to the worst people in history, such as Hitler.ĪLLYN: Yeah. O'BRIEN: Unstyled hair, ugly face, bad teeth, too short, unathletic, slight, bad posture, bad skin, overweight, poor figure, et cetera. MATT O'BRIEN: It finally got to this point where it was saying, like, I have a really bad character.ĪLLYN: Let's just say it didn't stop there. Its answers were fast, and it could hold forth on a wide range of subjects. At first, O'Brien found the chatbot impressive. It also includes a chatbot that can hold text conversations a whole lot like a human. It's the first-ever search engine powered by AI. He was testing out Microsoft's new Bing earlier this month. NPR's Bobby Allyn reports on how this experiment in artificial intelligence tech backfired.īOBBY ALLYN, BYLINE: Matt O'Brien is a technology reporter for the Associated Press.
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