Gaslighting, love bombing and narcissism: why is Microsoft Bing chatbot so unhinged?

tech.hindustantimes.com:

There's a race to transform search. And Microsoft just scored a home goal with its new Bing search chatbot, Sydney, which has been terrifying early adopters with death threats, among other troubling outputs.

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. Users can also have ongoing conversations with them.

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. For example, you might ask for a poem for your grandmother's 90th birthday, in the style of Pam Ayres, and receive back some comic verse.

Microsoft is now leading the search chatbot race with Sydney (as mixed as its reception has been). The tech giant's USD 10 billion partnership with OpenAI provides it exclusive access to ChatGPT, one of the latest and best chatbots.

So why isn't all going according to plan?

Bing's AI goes berserk

Earlier this month, Microsoft announced it had incorporated ChatGPT into Bing, giving birth to “Sydney”. Within 48 hours of the release, one million people joined the waitlist to try it out.

Google responded with its own announcement, demoing a search chatbot grandly named “Bard”, in homage to the greatest writer in the English language. Google's demo was a PR disaster.

At a company event, Bard gave the wrong answer to a question and the share price of Google's parent company, Alphabet, dropped dramatically. The incident wiped more than USD 100 billion off the company's total value.

On the other hand, all was looking good for Microsoft. That is until early users of Sydney