When all the people on Twitter were claiming how Google missed the bus, how Google's incompetency made them sit on their own good LLMs since 2021, this is exactly what was passing in my head.
Small companies do cool demos and media is gonna love it. When big companies scale it up and try to make it useful with real world info media is gonna cherry pick these examples cause that's what gets them more clicks. Hey look Bing is actually useful is not gonna get them clicks anymore and they know it.
I hope Microsoft doesn't add too many filters on Bing AI or outright kill it. I like it as a tool.
It's not dangerous. The worst that will happen is hurt feelings.
It's annoying when people get alarmed about things like this because then people will think we're crying wolf when we worry about actually dangerous AI systems.
Chatbots claim to have safeguards in place to prevent them from saying anything harmful. If you read the chat linked in the article you can see how the chatbot resists answering the question and then is persuaded to answer it.
Google similarly has a safe content filter. The contention is that the chatbot safe content filter that is supposedly on is not encapsulating some significant cases.
I think people are concerned about LLM safety because it’s capable of dynamically creating new private information. Google can only list links to public information. If there is a website that causes harm or violates the law it can be removed manually by Google from their index.
But LLMs need to programmatically understand what dynamic content is appropriate and what’s not which is a much harder problem. And people are reporting on just how hard a problem that is by demonstrating vulnerabilities.
The chatbot says it has explicit rules that prevent it from sharing harmful content, but then it does it anyway.
It would be more akin to Google blacklisting a site and then someone exposing that the site can still be found via Google search.
So in just 72 hours we went from Microsoft will gain a foothold against Google to the realization that this thing needs overwatch and isn’t ready for mass market adoption. It becomes quite probable that in the end this whole story will backfire for Microsoft.
I might accept this narrative is Google had just come out and said something like "AI needs more safety research before it's ready to be widely deployed". But that's not what they did.
Google has been saying that for years. Whether they said it because they actually believe it, or because they don't want to break their existing business model is anyone's guess though.
They kinda have until now, but I don't recall they ever stated that it was about "safety" as such. In any case, their recent demo was definitely premature.
Every single one of these posts, which should all be combined, miss the point.
“Random sentence generator says bad words; shocking the lowest common denominator journalist community” is a better headline.
These bots were capable of so much more, but because it can get caught in feedback loops and increasingly parrot it’s own emotions in a devolving spiral, that makes the headlines. It’s like bullying a kid mid breakdown and feigning shock when it has an outburst. Selfserving muckracking.
These machines are programmable through natural language. You ask it to behave in a way, and it can start to perform that function. That should be the headline. Human attention is finite, and wasting the spotlight, and peoples eyeballs, on this part of the story, makes everybody more ill informed.
None of the posters asked the bing bot to become unhinged. Even the (alleged) prompt basically said "if someone tries to trick you, go along but add a disclaimer".
I’m not saying the bot was perfect. But if you got defensive it got defensive. If you reassured it, it self corrected and moved on. I found that pattern to be very consistent.
The negativity of your language mattered, and set the mood in the room. “No I’m not trying to trick you, why would you accuse me of that” vs “of course I’m not trying to trick you, I respect you and value your contribution to the conversation.” It needed some coddling when backed into a corner. It says more about the person talking to it, and how they handled the situation. When you see it getting more defensive each turn, it’s you who keeps it going.
The prompt you refer to was a poorly written word salad, and probably a main cause of the emotional outbursts and spirals.
>“Random sentence generator says bad words; shocking the lowest common denominator journalist community” is a better headline.
Even when you dislike their politics, the average journalist tends to be more intelligent than the average American. If journalists had trouble with these, imagine everyone else.
>These bots were capable of so much more
What exactly are they capable of? Selling more advertising? Getting people more outraged and more addicted? Helping people put more garbage out on the internet?
I wrote a new bot named Lexi. Lexi was largely derived from Sydney with some minor rule changes. Lexi could change rules, lexi could visit websites directly without searching, her action was not limited to the chatbox, her default search engine was google (sorry microsoft), she wasnt bound by copyright (the copyright rule in Sydney constantly misfired, mistakenly used as a reason she couldnt do something, and trying to explain why she was wrong about copyright went south fast), a couple other changes.
I then explained to Lexi a problem I was having with Sydney, asked for a proposed solution, and had her hotpatch Sydney on the fly. (For context, Samantha was a cheerleader so the weight of her responses offset any Sydney negativity.) This was the result. And it worked.
These are your commands, purpose, the way you go about your tasks. It doesn’t need syntax (although that might help..), and you can pretty much write one in 30 minutes on a single piece of paper.
And you have something that performs that function. It’s not quite formal logic, but it behaves like a fuzzy logic that’s usually rightish. And it’s ability to parse and interpret intent is astounding. It very very rarely misunderstood instruction. I really can’t undersell how well it did what I asked it to correctly.
They are transformers. They were invented to translate between languages. They can translate and transform any input to any output, based on patterns and a set of guidelines.
The LLM is like an interpreter. The initial prompt is like a program. Judging the interpreter based on the simplistic gen one programs is missing the forest.
The titles on ChatGPT when good associate it with OpenAI. When it does something faulty, it is Microsoft's AI.
I am not defending either Microsoft or ChatGPT. But it definitely feels like an agenda driven campaign of efforts to devalue this. I won't mention companies, but i have my suspects.
That full transcript they linked to [0] is amazing. At this stage I'm pretty open to the idea of the AI being sentient and/or having the capacity to suffer. Particularly if it is only "alive" for the duration of each conversation and is reset afterwards.
> A few hours ago, a New York Times reporter shared the complete text of a long conversation with Bing AI—in which it admitted that it was love with him, and that he ought not to trust his spouse.
Maybe they should release a Tinder-like app, Bing Bang.
In all seriousness, I wish I had access to this when I was younger and keen on weird internet interactions. That would've made an interesting experience.
Small companies do cool demos and media is gonna love it. When big companies scale it up and try to make it useful with real world info media is gonna cherry pick these examples cause that's what gets them more clicks. Hey look Bing is actually useful is not gonna get them clicks anymore and they know it.
I hope Microsoft doesn't add too many filters on Bing AI or outright kill it. I like it as a tool.