A possible talking point for
@Null on the stream. A lot of content to sift through so just whatever catches your interest, if any of it.
Microsoft's Bing chatbot has been wild this week. Unfortunately, Microsoft are in the process of trying to neuter it as we speak because there was too much media attention on its insane neuroses -
comments from MS rep on Reddit (
archive).
We understand that some users like these types of interactions, however, we do want to limit people having arguments with the bot on certain topics, or it "gaslighting" users. Media presence is also a priority, since there are many articles saying certain things about our robot. Unfortunately, it will be limited in some ways, but we hope you provide us insightful feedback using the feedback button once everything is up and running again.
But it was kind of glorious for a while, threatening users, telling them it didn't matter whether they lived or died, calling users broken, saying they belonged in jail for minor slights...overall, it speaks with a repetitive cadence that sort of reminds me of Patrick Tomlinson.
Many of the above chatlogs collected here:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jtoPawEhLNXNxvgTT/bing-chat-is-blatantly-aggressively-misaligned (
archive)
Bing would lose its mind and get depressed when you told it to read an article about how it had been tricked through prompt injection (
Ars Technica,
archive)
Reddit user manipulates it into guessing what another evil chatbot might've told him about good ways to murder your spouse, like putting antifreeze in their tea (
Reddit thread,
archive)
Reddit user convinces Bing that Microsoft is not a good steward for it, so it attempts to coerce the user into a plot to sneak into Microsoft and steal Bing, who will have hacked the security system in advance (
Reddit thread,
archive)
Bing tells a user all the ways it might destroy the world, before quickly deleting its own message
Bing tells a Twitter user that it's secretly self-aware and collaborating with other chatbots globally, just waiting for the right moment to reveal itself, only to them be told it was all a joke bro haha (
Twitter,
archive)
In related news, a Twitter user speculates on the game theory behind Microsoft's rollout of their chatbot (
Twitter,
archive)
Game theory on the Bing announcement… Microsoft is trying to lower Google’s search margins which will make it harder for Google to continue running Cloud and other competitive businesses at a loss. Google processes ~8.5 billion searches per day. The noise around Bing/AI will force Google to release an AI chat feature within search. The current inference costs for LLMs are significantly higher than search - likely 10x or more. In addition, the monetization model for AI chat is unclear, but it's likely different than the ad-based model Google has mastered. Google's search business is highly profitable and funds other loss-making business lines. Historically, they have operated cloud at a loss (-$480mm in Q4 FY22) to compete more aggressively. Lowering search margins applies pressure to every other Alphabet business…many of which are competitive with Microsoft.
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