The software company Microsoft is thus reacting to a number of incidents in which the text robot got out of hand and formulated answers that were perceived as encroaching and inappropriate.
In a blog post, the company announced that it would now limit Bing chats to 50 questions per day and five per session. “Our data showed that the vast majority of people find the answers they are looking for within 5 rounds,” the Bing team explained. Only about one percent of chat conversations contain more than 50 messages. When users reach the limit of five entries per session, Bing will prompt them to start a new topic.
Microsoft had previously warned against engaging in lengthy conversations with the AI chatbot, which is still in a testing phase. Longer chats with 15 or more questions could lead to Bing “repeating itself or prompting or provoking answers that aren’t necessarily helpful or don’t match our intended tonality.”
A test of the Bing chatbot by a reporter from the New York Times caused a stir on the Internet. In a dialogue lasting more than two hours, the chatbot claimed that he loved the journalist. He then asked the reporter to separate from his wife.
Other users had previously pointed out the chatbot’s “inappropriate responses”. For example, the Bing software told a user that it would probably choose its own survival over his. With another user, she insisted that it was 2022. When he insisted that 2023 was the correct year, the text robot became abusive. The chatbot also threatened a philosophy professor, saying “I can blackmail you, I can threaten you, I can hack you, I can expose you, I can ruin you,” before deleting the threat himself.
Microsoft relies on technology from the start-up OpenAI for its Bing chatbot and supports the Californian AI company with billions. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella sees the integration of AI functions as an opportunity to reverse the market conditions in competition with the Google group Alphabet. He also wants to use AI to secure the supremacy of his office software and push the cloud business with Microsoft Azure.
Google has launched its own AI offensive with the chatbot Bard to counter the push by Microsoft and OpenAI. According to a report by “Business Insider”, CEO Sundar Pichai has asked his employees to push ahead with the further development of the system: They should invest two to four hours of their weekly working time in training the chatbot.
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