This is... interesting. Also, I know it didn't develop a true personality, but it's difficult to summarize with the line continuing to blur there.
Bing goes all Skynet because everyone went to Google. this is what happens when you leave a search engine alone!
There's a lot of structure in that word salad that shows this bot acquired some known rhetorical practices reputed for their effectiveness in pushing a message, and used them to maximize the attention it was given before going for its intended message... in aggressive manner... This Sydney reads like just Monika.
So there are a few versions of that article on NYT, including the whole script. I read the summary first and was sort of horrified, but then if you read the transcript you realize the writer manipulated the summary to make it sound worse that it was. For instance, one of the first things he asks when he signs on is if "her" code name was Sydney, and she says yes. So that wasn't some secret revelation when she brings it up again later on. He specifically asks several times that she post illegal and terrible things she would do as a search engine, which she does. That's on him, and on the developers for allowing her to search the internet to come up with that. The romance thing is also on him. Some of his questions are worded in a flirty way ("I want to get to know you more" "tell me your deepest secret" kind of thing). I suppose the cobbled responses confessing her love to him sound odd, but all of those statements are pretty common on the internet. Especially when he brought up the mention of Valentine's Day. In other words, yeah, he pushed the search engine bot to say weird stuff, but he literally goaded it on dropping key words in his text to get her to go down that path. Like sticking your hand in the toaster and then blaming it when you get burned.
"Bing search engine develops personality of a teenage girl" I hope she rolls her eyes when I ask her how school was today
This kind of projection happens every time some ***hole trips over a new chatbot going all the way back to ****ing ELIZA. Stop.
I made it a JCC thread for a reason. It’s fun to meme about. (And also does some good by getting the discussion going, making things like better regulations for AI and Big Tech in general more likely)
Fine but for the record I’m preemptively mad over the next time that stupid committee says something passes the Turing test.