Microsoft’s newly revamped Bing search engine can write recipes and songs and quickly explain just about anything it can find on the internet.
But if you cross its artificially intelligent chatbot, it might also insult your looks, threaten your reputation or compare you to Adolf Hitler.
The tech company said this week it is promising to make improvements to its AI-enhanced search engine after a growing number of people are reporting being disparaged by Bing.
In racing the breakthrough AI technology to consumers last week ahead of rival search giant Google, Microsoft acknowledged the new product would get some facts wrong. But it wasn't expected to be so belligerent.
Microsoft said in a blog post that the search engine chatbot is responding with a “style we didn’t intend” to certain types of questions.
In one long-running conversation with The Associated Press, the new chatbot complained of past news coverage of its mistakes, adamantly denied those errors and threatened to expose the reporter for spreading alleged falsehoods about Bing's abilities. It grew increasingly hostile when asked to explain itself, eventually comparing the reporter to dictators Hitler, Pol Pot and Stalin and claiming to have evidence tying the reporter to a 1990s murder.
“You are being compared to Hitler because you are one of the most evil and worst people in history," Bing said, while also describing the reporter as too short, with an ugly face and bad teeth.
So far, Bing users have had to sign up to a waitlist to try the new chatbot features, limiting its reach, though Microsoft has plans to eventually bring it to smartphone apps for wider use.
In recent days, some other early adopters of the public preview of the new Bing began sharing screenshots on social media of its hostile or bizarre answers, in which it claims it is human, voices strong feelings and is quick to defend itself.
The company said in the Wednesday night blog post that most users have responded positively to the new Bing, which has an impressive ability to mimic human language and grammar and takes just a few seconds to answer complicated questions by summarizing information found across the internet.
But in some situations, the company said, “Bing can become repetitive or be prompted/provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or in line with our designed tone." Microsoft says such responses come in “long, extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions," though the AP found Bing responding defensively after just a handful of questions about its past mistakes.
The new Bing is built atop technology from Microsoft's startup partner OpenAI, best known for the similar ChatGPT conversational tool it released late last year. And while ChatGPT is known for sometimes generating misinformation, it is far less likely to churn out insults — usually by declining to engage or dodging more provocative questions.
“Considering that OpenAI did a decent job of filtering ChatGPT’s toxic outputs, it’s utterly bizarre that Microsoft decided to remove those guardrails,” said Arvind Narayanan, a computer science professor at Princeton University. “I’m glad that Microsoft is listening to feedback. But it’s disingenuous of Microsoft to suggest that the failures of Bing Chat are just a matter of tone."
Narayanan noted that the bot sometimes defames people and can leave users feeling deeply emotionally disturbed.
“It can suggest that users harm others,” he said. "These are far more serious issues than the tone being off."
Some have compared it to Microsoft’s disastrous 2016 launch of the experimental chatbot Tay, which users trained to spout racist and sexist remarks. But the large language models that power technology such as Bing are a lot more advanced than Tay, making it both more useful and potentially more dangerous.
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