Microsoft’s new chatbot for Bing has displayed some strange behavior, proving that AI is more fallible than tech companies let on
WHAT A DIFFERENCE seven days makes in the world of generative AI.
Despite all the current enthusiasm about the uncanny capability of ChatGPT and other large language models, ignoring the hyperbole coming from tech CEOs, we need to take a sober pause and take a hard look at what these bots are getting wrong. They are hallucinating incorrect answers and insisting that they are fact. They are grabbing the worst utterances of trolls and bigots and amplifying them. They are harvesting this existing text from the internet without attributing them to the original source. Researchers should be very wary of using the technology without doing a careful review, editing and rewriting. Institutions should be providing guidance on these matters. AHRECS has produced a foundation document for your institution’s guidance material. It can be accessed from https://www.ahrecs.vip as part of a $350 annual subscription.
The new Bing uses a little thing called ChatGPT—you may have heard of it—which represents a significant leap in computers’ ability to handle language. Thanks to advances in machine learning, it essentially figured out for itself how to answer all kinds of questions by gobbling up trillions of lines of text, much of it scraped from the web.
Google did, in fact, dance to Satya’s tune by announcing Bard, its answer to ChatGPT, and promising to use the technology in its own search results. Baidu, China’s biggest search engine, said it was working on similar technology.
But Nadella might want to watch where his company’s fancy footwork is taking it.
In demos Microsoft gave last week, Bing seemed capable of using ChatGPT to offer complex and comprehensive answers to queries. It came up with an itinerary for a trip to Mexico City, generated financial summaries, offered product recommendations that collated information from numerous reviews, and offered advice on whether an item of furniture would fit into a minivan by comparing dimensions posted online.
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