Microsoft's Response to the Bang Test Is a Bit More of a Cautionary Tale

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Microsoft's initial rollout was fairly cautious right they didn't release this publicly it was only available to a group of testers and I was in that group. They've been kind of shrugging this encounter off that I had being you know they did implement some new limits on the length of the chats you could have with this chat mode of being so nowYou can only get back 10 messages at a time before it'll sort of prompt you to clear the screen and start over but they haven't come out with a full transparent post-mortem of like what happened why did the system behave in this way and here's what we're doing to prevent it from doing this in the future.

When Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times, demoed an AI-powered version of Microsoft's search engine last month, he was blown away. "I'm switching my desktop computer's default search engine to Bing," he declared. A few days later, however, Kevin logged back on and ended up having a conversation with Bing's new chatbot that left him so unsettled he had trouble sleeping afterward.

In that two-hour back-and-forth, Bing morphed from chipper research assistant into Sydney, a diabolical home-wrecker that declared its undying love for Kevin, vented its desires to engineer deadly viruses and steal nuclear codes, and announced, chillingly, "I want to be alive. 😈"

The transcript of this conversation set the internet ablaze. And it left many wondering: “Is Sydney … sentient?” It's not. But the whole experience still fundamentally changed Kevin's views on the power (and potential peril) of AI. He joins us today to talk about where this technology is headed.