Angry Bing chatbot just mimicking humans, say experts

Microsoft’s nascent Bing chatbot turning testy or even threatening is likely because it essentially mimics what it learned from online conversations, analysts and academics said on Friday.

Tales of disturbing exchanges with the artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot — including it issuing threats and speaking of desires to steal nuclear code, create a deadly virus, or to be alive — have gone viral this week.

“I think this is basically mimicking conversations that it’s seen online,” said Graham Neubig, an associate professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s language technologies institute. “So once the conversation takes a turn, it’s probably going to stick in that kind of angry state, or say ‘I love you’ and other things like this, because all of this is stuff that’s been online before.”

A chatbot, by design, serves up words it predicts are the most likely responses, without understanding meaning or context. However, humans taking part in banter with programs naturally tend to read emotion and intent into what a chatbot says.

“Large language models have no concept of ‘truth’ — they just know how to best complete a sentence in a way that’s statistically probable based on their inputs and training set,” programmer Simon Willison said in a blog post. “So they make things up, and then state them with extreme confidence.”

Laurent Daudet, co-founder of French AI company LightOn, theorised that the chatbot seemingly-gone-rogue was trained on exchanges that themselves turned aggressive or inconsistent. “Addressing this requires a lot of effort and a lot of human feedback, which is also the reason why we chose to restrict ourselves for now to business uses and not more conversational ones,” Daudet told AFP.

The Bing chatbot was designed by Microsoft and the start-up OpenAI, which has been causing a sensation since the November launch of ChatGPT, the headline-grabbing app capable of generating all sorts of written content in seconds on a simple request.

Since ChatGPT burst onto the scene, the technology behind it, known as generative AI, has been stirring up fascination and concern.

Microsoft announced on Friday it had capped the amount of back-and-forth people can have with its chatbot over a given question, because “very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model in the new Bing.”