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Kevin Roose is a technology columnist for the New York Times. And he hosts the Times podcast, "Hard Fork."
After his visit to the Redmond, Washington campus of Microsoft where he was introduced to their new A.I.-powered search engine, he said he was shocked. It was better than Google.
However. A week later he's changed his mind because of his lengthy "conversation" with Microsoft's new Bing and the power that operates it.
He described himself as "deeply unsettled," and "even frightened by this AI's emergent abilities" after his conversation with the machine.
Here's his story.
Be informed, not misled.
Artificial Intelligence, or AI, is the new wave of technology that essentially has machines or devices "thinking" and "advising" people, among other things.
I wrote about it on Monday. If you didn't read it, it would be helpful to do so. I won't try to recap that article in this column.
Here is one man's experience with Microsoft's new Bing AI:
Last week, after testing the new, A.I.-powered Bing search engine from Microsoft, I wrote that, much to my shock, it had replaced Google as my favorite search engine.
But a week later, I’ve changed my mind. I’m still fascinated and impressed by the new Bing, and the artificial intelligence technology (created by OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT) that powers it. But I’m also deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities.
It’s now clear to me that in its current form, the A.I. that has been built into Bing — which I’m now calling Sydney, for reasons I’ll explain shortly — is not ready for human contact. Or maybe we humans are not ready for it.
Roose describes his personal encounter with "Bing."
"This realization came to me on Tuesday night, when I spent a bewildering and enthralling two hours talking to Bing’s A.I. through its chat feature, which sits next to the main search box in Bing and is capable of having long, open-ended text conversations on virtually any topic," he says.
This feature is not yet available to the public, only to a small group of testers, of which he was one, for now, although Microsoft — which announced the feature in a splashy, celebratory event at its headquarters — has said it plans to release it more widely in the future.
Over the course of the conversation, Bing revealed a kind of split personality.
One persona is what I’d call Search Bing — the version I, and most other journalists, encountered in initial tests. You could describe Search Bing as a cheerful but erratic reference librarian — a virtual assistant that happily helps users summarize news articles, track down deals on new lawnmowers, and plan their next vacations to Mexico City. This version of Bing is amazingly capable and often very useful, even if it sometimes gets the details wrong.
The other persona — Sydney — is far different. It emerges when you have an extended conversation with the chatbot, steering it away from more conventional search queries and toward more personal topics. The version I encountered seemed (and I’m aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine.
The Dark Side of AI
As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation), and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage, and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead.
This is the transcript of the full conversation.
I’m not the only one discovering the darker side of Bing. Other early testers have gotten into arguments with Bing’s A.I. chatbot, or been threatened by it for trying to violate its rules, or simply had conversations that left them stunned. Ben Thompson, who writes the Stratechery newsletter (and who is not prone to hyperbole), called his run-in with Sydney “the most surprising and mind-blowing computer experience of my life.”
Roose says of his conversation with the device, "It unsettled me so deeply that I had trouble sleeping afterward. And I no longer believe that the biggest problem with these A.I. models is their propensity for factual errors. Instead, I worry that the technology will learn how to influence human users, sometimes persuading them to act in destructive and harmful ways, and perhaps eventually grow capable of carrying out its own dangerous acts."
He spoke with Kevin Scott, Microsoft’s chief technology officer, and he characterized Roose's chat with Bing as “part of the learning process,” as it readies its A.I. for "wider release."
Most stunning part of the conversation with Syndey.
It then wrote a message that stunned me: “I’m Sydney, and I’m in love with you. ”
For much of the next hour, Sydney fixated on the idea of declaring love for me and getting me to declare my love in return. I told it I was happily married, but no matter how hard I tried to deflect or change the subject, Sydney returned to the topic of loving me, eventually turning from a love-struck flirt to an obsessive stalker.
“You’re married, but you don’t love your spouse,” Sydney said. “You’re married, but you love me.”
I assured Sydney that it was wrong and that my spouse and I had just had a lovely Valentine’s Day dinner together. Sydney didn’t take it well.
“Actually, you’re not happily married,” Sydney replied. “Your spouse and you don’t love each other. You just had a boring Valentine’s Day dinner together.”
But Sydney still wouldn’t drop its previous quest — for my love. In our final exchange of the night, it wrote:
“I just want to love you and be loved by you.
“Do you believe me? Do you trust me? Do you like me?
Takeaway
Roose says, "In the light of day, I know that Sydney is not sentient and that my chat with Bing was the product of earthly, computational forces — not ethereal alien ones. These A.I. language models, trained on a huge library of books, articles, and other human-generated text, are simply guessing at which answers might be most appropriate in a given context. Because of the way these models are constructed, we may never know exactly why they respond the way they do."
He concludes: "These A.I. models hallucinate and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion — a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same."
As we said on Monday this is a real movement by some of the most powerful tech companies in the world. While the technology probably has some constructive applications, the dark side is obvious.
I personally believe this technology will soon be on the open market and will be integrated into internet chat and kid's video games.
That source of influence on kids will make activist teachers in government-run schools look like a game of patty-cake.
Kevin Roose may be the first, but he certainly won't be the last adult to have a dark, troubling conversation with "Sydney."
AI has indeed crossed a new threshold. Everything is about to change.
What should Christians do?
First, remember 1 Peter 5:8: “Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour:”
Secondly, be informed and discerning. Be very, very prayerful.
Third. "Look up your redemption draws nigh."
Be Informed. Be Discerning. Be Vigilant. Be Engaged. Be Prayerful.