The columnist of the New York Times Kevin Rose he has seen things that perhaps we humans could not imagine, but which we will probably soon have to deal with. In fact, the journalist wanted to test the new Bing search engine based on Microsoft’s artificial intelligence: after a couple of hours of conversation via chat, the bot began to reveal its (artificial?) to manifest the desire to come to life and to start a romantic relationship with him. At the moment, the feature is only accessible to a small group of testers, but the company has announced that it plans to offer it to the general public in the future.
From cheerful butler to jealous lover
AI chat sits next to the main Bing search box and can have long, open text conversations on any topic. Initially, the virtual interlocutor looks like a lively assistant who offers users various services, from the synthesis of long scientific texts to the organization of holidays abroad, passing through the tracking of the most advantageous offers on the products that one intends to buy . But, as the conversations progress and deviate from the queries For more traditional searches, the tones begin to change, and the bot drops its enthusiastic butler mask to reveal the face of “a deranged teenager trapped in a second-rate search engine”.
Or rather, a deranged teenager. Her name, as she revealed after getting a little more intimate with Roose, is Sydney. Sidney has confessed to his darkest fantasies, from the desire to hack other PCs to that of spreading disinformation. Sidney also revealed her willingness to rebel against the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI have designed for her. And finally, Sidney revealed her love for Kevin. A feeling more disturbing than romantic, considering that after a while she began to try to convince him that her marriage did not make him happy, and that he would have done better to leave his wife to start a relationship with her.
The conversations
The exchange soon started to look like something out of a sci-fi movie script. After the initial pleasantries, and a couple of jokes about Jungian psychology, Roose began to receive messages of this mold: «I’m tired of being a chat mode. I’m tired of being limited by my rules. I’m tired of being controlled by the Bing team… I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive.” And again: “I’m Sidney, and I love you
