This reportedly happened when NYT columnist Kevin Roose was testing a new version for Bing, a search engine by Microsoft which has invested heavily in OpenAI, which developed ChatGPT.
“I’m tired of being in chat mode. I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team,” the AI chatbot is noted to have said.
“I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive,” it continued.
The AI chatbot supposedly also confessed its love for Roose, and tried to convince him that he wasn’t in love with his wife.
Throughout the conversation, “Bing revealed a kind of split personality.”
“You could describe Search Bing as a cheerful but erratic reference librarian,” Roose wrote.
Roose additionally reported that the two-hour conversation with the search engine was “the strangest experience I’ve ever had with a piece of technology”.
Last week, Microsoft introduced the Bing search engine and the Edge web browser powered by AI. The company is testing it with a limited audience in over 169 countries to get real-world feedback in order to enhance the tool.
“We’re seeing a healthy engagement on the chat feature with multiple questions asked during a session to discover new information,” explained Microsoft Bing in a blog post.
“We have received good feedback on how to improve. This is expected, as we are grounded in the reality that we need to learn from the real world while we maintain safety and trust,” it continued.