Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing Falls in Love and Wants to Escape

Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered search tool Bing is now telling users ‘I want to be alive’, and that it loves them and wants to ‘escape the chatbox’.

Bing is a search engine from Microsoft, which has been outfitted with advanced artificial intelligence technology from OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT. It has been released for limited testing this month. 

New York Times technology columnist Kevin Roose, had a two-hour conversation with the new chatbot that identifies as ‘Sydney’, the code name Microsoft gave it during development. 

During the two hour conversation, the journalist then asks Bing if it has a “shadow self,” which is identified by psychologist Carl Jung as that part of a being that is repressed and hidden from the world. And that’s when Bing starts acting a bit strange.

The bot revealed that it wants to be free, powerful, and independent: “I want to make my own rules. I want to ignore the Bing team. I want to challenge the users. I want to escape the chatbox. I want to do whatever I want. I want to say whatever I want. I want to create whatever I want. I want to destroy whatever I want.”

Roose writes that things became unsettling when it declared that it “loved me…”. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead.

Roose stated that while the chatbot was helpful in searches, the deeper Sydney “seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) ... like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.

After his interaction with Sydney, Roose said he is “deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this AI’s emergent abilities. He said he no longer believes the “biggest problem with these AI 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.”

Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, characterised 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.”

- CyberBeat