Microsoft Has No Idea How Stupid to Make Its AI

The company had a change of heart after "lobotomizing" its AI.

Bing Em Out

It's only been a few days since Microsoft announced that it was majorly restricting its unhinged Bing artificial intelligence chatbot — but apparently, the tech giant is already having major second thoughts about its decision.

In a statement issued yesterday, Microsoft seemed to reverse course on its previous announcement that it was seriously restricting the AI's abilities by putting caps on the number and length of responses, noting that many users seemed to want the "long and intricate chat sessions" with the bot codenamed "Sydney" back.

"The first step we are taking is we have increased the chat turns per session to six and expanded to 60 total chats per day," the statement reads. "Our data shows that for the vast majority of you this will enable your natural daily use of Bing."

Microsoft added that it plans to "go further" and "increase the daily cap to 100 total chats soon" — a bizarre change of heart given that until a few days ago, there was no limit at all.

Improved Upon

To be fair, some of the "improvements" Microsoft says it has planned actually sound pretty good considering Bing's horrifying behavior prior to Microsoft's update.

"We are also going to begin testing an additional option that lets you choose the tone of the Chat from more Precise – which will focus on shorter, more search-focused answers – to Balanced, to more Creative – which gives you longer and more chatty answers," the statement notes. "The goal is to give you more control on the type of chat behavior to best meet your needs."

Hopefully, the aforementioned option will allow users to get more reliable and appropriate answers, especially considering the kind of made-up nonsense it has been spouting, something that Microsoft surely should have seen coming.

While it's undoubtedly a good thing that Microsoft is not only listening to user feedback, but responding swiftly, this latest statement makes it sounds like the company is making it up as it's going along, something that doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the company's ability to stay on top of its AI.

This whole debacle has certainly been a fascinating glimpse into the limits of large language models like Bing — and we can't lie, we're excited to see where this AI train wreck goes next.

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