It seems that adding the artificial intelligence chatbot ChatGPT to its Bing search engine was both a stroke of genius and a bit of a disaster for Microsoft, but in its rush to fix things, could it end to make matters worse?
In a story arc that would have caused Mary Shelley to call her lawyers to discuss copyright infringement, Microsoft caught the world’s attention by unveiling an updated Bing that had a new ChatGPT-powered brain. This allowed users to ask more complex questions, and Bing answered in a human way, drawing inspiration from ChatGPT’s huge language models, as well as information from the Internet.
The potential was huge, and people finally talked about Bing, after years, well, nobody talked about it at all. However, once people started using the new Bing, some rather strange – and disturbing – quirks appeared, with Bing providing incorrect answers to questions, giving disturbing answers which alluded to a kind of Existential crisis and even throw tantrums and become aggressive with users.
Suddenly, all that positive exposure started to turn a little sour, leading Microsoft to hastily take a scalpel from Bing and give it a lobotomy. Topics were banned and the number of answers he could give has been reduced in an effort to prevent discussions with Bing from descending into weirdness.
The problem was that by removing the weirdness, Microsoft made Bing boring again.
Self-inflicted damage
After Microsoft drastically reduced the AI intelligence of the new Bing, people complained on the Internet. It seemed that Bing was now trying to avoid discussing contentious issues and would end a conversation after only five replies.
Microsoft had been a bit too blunt when it came to limiting Bing, and it looks like the company is now looking to roll back some of those changes. As CNET reports (opens in a new tab)a new blog post from Microsoft acknowledges that “since chat limits were implemented, we’ve received feedback from many of you wanting a return to longer chats, so you can both search more efficiently and better interact with the chat functionality”.
The company is looking at ways to bring back longer chats “responsibly,” and it’s upping the number of responses to six. Users can now also conduct a total of 60 chats per day with Bing, an increase from the 50 imposed last week. According to Microsoft (opens in a new tab)“Our data shows that for the vast majority of you, this will enable your natural daily Bing usage” and eventually this will increase to 100 chats per day.
However, all these hashes and changes are not very aesthetic for Microsoft. The inclusion of ChatGPT was meant to be a big boost for struggling search engine Bing, which failed to challenge Google’s dominance, and right after the reveal it seemed like Bing’s time in the spotlight the ramp had finally come. However, those early issues weren’t just embarrassing for Microsoft, they highlighted the dangers of showing off new technology too soon.
As I already mentionedfirst impressions count, and for many people this was their first time using Bing or ChatGPT – so if the experience was poor, they were unlikely to try again.
Microsoft later removing features, then adding some features, and drastic reductions in Bing’s capabilities mean no one really knows what Bing is. East at present. It feels like Microsoft may not have fully understood what it was creating, and that creation took on a life of its own and turned into a monster. In its rush to get it under control, the company may have inadvertently killed its creation in the process.