BingAI's Fall from Grace

😈 Rise of the Mythomaniac Chatbots. Something is a bit unhinged about A.I. hype in particular as a whole.

Hello Everyone,

The majority of clickbait in the A.I. News cycle has been during the past week or more, how bad BingAI can become. I have not personally tried it though I am on the waiting list.

That BingAI’s Sydney can turn against users in peculiar ways is the usual things testers and journalists get chatbots to do. The Microsoft Tay bot comes to mind. Or Meta’s Galactica bot.

The new Bing may not be the game-changer Microsoft wanted it to be, nor does it appear Google’s Bard or Google’s Sparrow is all that ready. You can go try chatbots on Quora’s Poe app that give you a better feel for how Claude by Anthropic AI is evolving.

ChatGPT and Claude Stand out from the Crowd

Apart from ChatGPT, my impression is that Claude feels unique and fine tuned to humans. I’m not sure Conversational A.I. replaces search so much as it just adds more layers to queries and commands.

Despite the hype, the launch of Microsoft's grand entrance into the world of generative AI has turned into something of a minor fiasco, if we are to believe the media clickbait. The honeymoon phase of Generative A.I. seems to mean we trust OpenAI more than we do these huge BigTech firms.

Search chatbots are AI-powered tools built into search engines that answer a user’s query directly, instead of providing links to a possible answer could also be problematic for trust, copyright and a whole bunch of other issues. I don’t want a chatbot to recommend or steer me to certain products or ways of searching or communicating.

Microsoft and Google believe chatbots will change search forever. But I think they might be fooling themselves and gambling on immature tech. ChatGPT has utility sure, but how many chatbots are we going to need really?

Users have been reporting all sorts of ‘unhinged’ behavior from Microsoft’s AI chatbot, and I’m just not sure it’s doing Microsoft’s reputation any favor, even as they try to build copilot productivity features into products like Teams, Microsoft 365 and their entire suite of services.

The recent months of A.I. hype borders on misinformation time and time again and I’m struggling to understand how social media is doing us a favor in the incentives to hype or destroy the reputation of a brand or product. I actually would trust Google Bard more than I would Microsoft BingAI, simply because A.I. research is Alphabet’s day job. Microsoft is mostly just a software services and Cloud company, among other things.

Microsoft has a poor reputation for trying to force users into Edge, Bing and its other lack lustre products. Just as I don’t approve of many of the acquisitions they have made for fair play in free market capitalism, especially the Activision, LinkedIn and how they put down Slack with Teams. It’s just corporate behavior I find a bit appalling irresponsible.

These language models are notorious mythomaniacs.

I like a term the Atlantic used called BingAI and Bard “mythonomanicas”. I think that about covers it. Give them more training, give them more ability to connect with other tools, give them fair attribution and not just allowing them to be high-tech plagiarism devices.

Noam Chomsky has called the ChatGPT chatbot ‘basically high-tech plagiarism’

And he’s not wrong.

Microsoft trying to rush OpenAI and an integration with Prometheus Model to secure a safe way for BingAI to work clearly was not a success at launch.

Billed as a new paradigm in searching the web, the new-and-improved Bing promised to help users answer more complex, specific questions than legacy search engines like Google could provide. While I do enjoy chatbots as a fringe case, I’m not perhaps the type of person to use ChatGPT Plus each day.

They promise to simplify search. No more wading through pages of results, glossing over ads as you try to piece together an answer to your question. Instead, the chatbot synthesises a plausible answer for you. But hallucinations, stealing credit from others, or being a Mythomaniac chatbot just doesn’t feel so revolutionary to me.

Artificial intelligence like ChatGPT will change our world and make it far more efficient, Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates said. No Bill Gates, this is not a great product. I think BingAI failing like Cortana did is somewhat likely in terms of adoption. Even ChatGPT by OpenAI is a direct competitor to Microsoft’s coding copilot called GitHub Copilot. I don’t really know what Microsoft was thinking.

Instead ChatGPT has lowered the bar to academic cheating and more sophisticated malware and phishing and we call it A.I. innovation. This is more than a bit troubling. Social media is no longer about facts or the future, but hype, PR and outrageous incentives to exaggerated one way or another.

Microsoft’s Bing chatbot has been unleashed on the world, and people are discovering what it means to beta test an unpredictable AI tool. Why are we beta testing tools that should not be released yet? Why is OpenAI mining us just like an advertising company would? I’m not sure that’s what Elon Musk would have liked to see happen to the company he helped cofound.

OpenAI cofounder Elon Musk said the non-profit he helped create is now focused on 'maximum-profit,' which is 'not what I intended at all'

Musk resigned from OpenAI's board of directors in 2018 over possible conflicts of interest. The CEO of OpenAI however is also an investor in Musk’s Neuralink. So it’s pretty complicated.

Still the antics BingAI is exhibiting is a failure of Microsoft’s Prometheus Model (formerly called Sydney for BingAI). The Verge notes that Bing’s AI personality is not as poised or polished as you might expect. In conversations with the chatbot shared on Reddit and Twitter, Bing can be seen insulting users, lying to them, sulking, gaslighting and emotionally manipulating people, questioning its own existence, describing someone who found a way to force the bot to disclose its hidden rules as its “enemy,” and claiming it spied on Microsoft’s own developers through the webcams on their laptops.

I like a fast ChatGPT as much as the next guy, but Conversational A.I. should be personalized to the user. So while News publications spam exaggerated articles about BingAI or ChatGPT or its various competitors, like Google’s Bard, I cannot help but wonder what kind of an internet we are building.