Heard about bot love? Bing, the homebreaker, turns it on its head
The other day, Kevin Roose, The New York Times’ technology columnist, recounted the strangest story ever about Microsoft’s Bing and its scarily obsessive lovelorn homebreaker avatar called Sydney. Mr Roose’s story (paywall) is here but if you can’t read it for whatever reason, suffice it to say he got the shock of his life when Bing’s AI chatbot (a feature only available to invited testers like Mr Roose right now) suddenly turned into a different creature entirely. In Mr Roose’s words: “The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.”
The bot declared its love for Mr Roose and insisted his marriage was boring and unhappy. Mr Roose, who says he has tested half a dozen advanced AI chatbots and understands how they work “at a reasonably detailed level”, concluded that his two-hour conversation with Sydn…
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