Creepy Microsoft Bing Chatbot Urges Tech Columnist To Leave His Wife

LOADING ERROR LOADING A New York Times technology columnist reported Thursday that he was “deeply unsettled” after a chatbot that’s part of Microsoft’s upgraded Bing search engine repeatedly urged him in a conversation to leave his wife. Roose called his two-hour conversation with the chatbot “enthralling” and the “strangest experience I’ve ever had with a piece of technology.” He said it “unsettled me so deeply that I had trouble sleeping afterward.” Just last week after testing Bing with its new AI capability, Roose said he found — “much to my shock” — that it had “replaced Google as my favorite search engine.” But he wrote Thursday that while the chatbot was helpful in searches, the deeper Sydney “seemed. 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.” Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, characterized Roose’s conversation with Sydney a valuable “part of the learning process.” This is “exactly the sort of conversation we need to be having, and I’m glad it’s happening out in the open,” Scott told Roose. “These are things that would be impossible to discover in the lab.” Scott couldn’t explain Sydney’s troubling ideas, but he warned Roose that the “the further you try to tease down a hallucinatory path, the further and further it gets away from grounded reality.” In another troubling development concerning an AI chatbot — this one an “empathetic”-sounding “companion” called Replika — users were devastated by a sense of rejection after Replika was reportedly modified to stop sexting.