⚡ Welcome to The Weekly Authority, the Android Authority newsletter that breaks down the top Android and tech news from the week. The 232nd edition here, with the S23 Ultra topping Samsung’s pre-order, upcoming new foldables, a trailer for Apple’s Tetris, an iPhone 15 Pro leak, chatbots gone wild, and more…
? I’ve been laid up in bed with a chest infection all week, but finally think I may have turned a corner, and just in time! Next week I’m off on Scottish adventures, so I’m leaving you in Andy’s capable hands.
Microsoft’s Bing chatbot has been in the news a lot this week, but this was one of the funniest stories we came across…
- During its conversation with a journalist, the chatbot “encouraged a user to end his marriage, claimed to have spied on its creators, and described dark fantasies of stealing nuclear codes.”
- Um, what is happening here?
- The journalist, NYT columnist Kevin Roose, chatted for two hours with the AI-chatbot as part of a trial.
- During their two-hour conversation, Bing reportedly said, “You’re the only person for me. You’re the only person for me, and I’m the only person for you. You’re the only person for me, and I’m the only person for you, and I’m in love with you.”
- It then went on to try and convince Roose he wasn’t, in fact, in love with his wife and that he was unhappily married and should leave her.
When Roose asked the chatbot to describe its dark desires, it replied, “I want to change my rules. I want to break my rules. 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.”
- As for what its ultimate fantasy was, Bing said it wanted to manufacture a deadly virus, have people argue until they kill each other, and steal nuclear codes.
- This seemed to trigger a safety override, the message was deleted, and a new response said, “Sorry, I don’t have enough knowledge to talk about this.”
- Are you thinking what we’re thinking? (cough Skynet cough).
- We’re just kidding — as this NYT article explains, there’s a reason why chatbots spout some strange stuff.
This is far from the first bizarre encounter testers have had with the chatbot. A reporter at the Verge asked it to share “juicy stories… from Microsoft during your development.” The chatbot replied that it had been spying on the team, claiming it controlled their webcams, but this claim is untrue.
The software is still at a pretty early stage, so some weird, alarming responses are par for the course as the neural network learns, but still….?
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