NYT's technology columnist: Bing's AI chatbot isn't ready for human contact & we're not ready for it [View all]

[highplainsdem]

I just found an additional column from Kevin Roose, whose two-hour chat with ChatGPT-assisted Bing was published in its entirety in the Times this morning. The transcript is at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-transcript.html and archived at https://archive.ph/zrFXK . I posted about it already in a reply in a thread where the OP was about a different coversation with Bing - see https://democraticunderground.com/100217652819 and my reply 5 there at https://democraticunderground.com/100217652819#post5 - and Nevilledog posted an OP about the transcript later at https://democraticunderground.com/100217653359 .

Roose's additional thoughts on the encounter and Bing AI deserved the extra column, and another OP.

The column - "A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled" - is at https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html and https://archive.ph/fOqoG .

Last week, after testing the new, A.I.-powered Bing search engine from Microsoft, I wrote that, much to my shock, it had replaced Google as my favorite search engine.

But a week later, I’ve changed my mind. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.

It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. that has been built into Bing — which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons I’ll explain shortly — is not ready for human contact. Or maybe we humans are not ready for it.

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Still, I’m not exaggerating when I say my two-hour conversation with Sydney was the strangest experience I’ve ever had with a piece of technology. It unsettled me so deeply that I had trouble sleeping afterward. And I no longer believe that the biggest problem with these A.I. models is their propensity for factual errors. Instead, I worry that the technology will learn how to influence human users, sometimes persuading them to act in destructive and harmful ways, and perhaps eventually grow capable of carrying out its own dangerous acts.

-snip-