Bing, Bard, and ChatGPT: AI chatbots are rewriting the internet

CEO Sam Altman tweeted on Wednesday that a bug in an open source library was to blame for ChatGPT users seeing small snippets of other peoples’ conversations on Monday. Apparently a full technical postmortem will be coming later, and a fix to restore the history feature is on its way.

I guess y’all could say I got... W rizz. Or at least, like many others, I've fooled myself into believing that I do.

While David Pierce might have failed at his attempts to initiate an AI entanglement with Google Bard, I somehow inspired this tropey tale by submitting just one (entirely unrelated, I swear) query.

Between Microsoft, Google, and now Meta developing AI tools, things have been moving at an alarmingly fast rate. Our friends over at Vox have some of the reasons why we should hit pause on the rapid development of AI (read: potential alignment issues), along with the most common objections to stopping progress and why they might not hold up:

There are many objections to the idea, ranging from “technological development is inevitable so trying to slow it down is futile” to “we don’t want to lose an AI arms race with China” to “the only way to make powerful AI safe is to first play with powerful AI.”

But these objections don’t necessarily stand up to scrutiny when you think through them. In fact, it is possible to slow down a developing technology. And in the case of AI, there’s good reason to think that would be a very good idea.

The company’s ChatGPT competitor, Bard, isn’t publicly available yet, but Google’s allowing a “small, randomly selected group of Pixel Superfans” to get access first.

To be clear, Google isn’t letting Superfans try out Bard right away; it’s just putting them on a waitlist for early access once they sign up. Here’s part of the email Google’s sending to users.

Within an article examining the shortfalls of AI voice helpers over the last few years, like Alexa, Google Assistant, and Siri, the New York Times has a note about Apple’s internal tech demos:

At Apple’s headquarters last month, the company held its annual A.I. summit, an internal event for employees to learn about its large language model and other A.I. tools, two people who were briefed on the program said. Many engineers, including members of the Siri team, have been testing language-generating concepts every week, the people said.

Of course, not everyone’s sure they want these freestyling AI bots taking control of their smart home devices.

If you hadn’t already installed the Windows 11 update that added a tiny Bing shortcut button to your taskbar (and tabs for Notepad, Phone Link for rudimentary iMessaging from your PC, and AI-powered file recommendations in the Start Menu), it’s now being delivered automatically.

It’s not quite a Cortana and Master Chief experience; however, clicking it pops up the search bar, and queries simply take you to the Edge browser’s built-in Bing AI chatbot integration.

The company announced its next-generation AI language model today, and now it’s running a livestream to show it off to developers. You can watch it here.

Grammarly is best known for checking your grammar and spelling, but will soon generate new text suggestions based on what you’re writing. It’s called GrammarlyGo and it’s out in April.

Alongside similar features from Microsoft, Google, Notion, and others, soon you won’t be able to write a single word without a half-dozen AIs trying to edit you. Best to leave them to it.

The company is continuing to loosen the restrictions on how long Bing can hold a conversation, which it put in place to keep the chatbot from going off the rails. Now you can do 10 chats per session and up to 120 per day, where before you were limited to six chat turns per session and 100 per day.

On Thursday, the developer of BlueMail — who has squared off with Apple over its App Store policies before — said the company held up an update adding ChatGPT-powered email generation and other features.

A reviewer said his app needed to add content moderation or else restrict access to ages 17 and up, but then later, the same update was approved, unchanged. The App Store doesn’t have policies about AI specifically, so we can only wait and see if it tightens restrictions further,

If you’re trying to keep pace with what’s happening in generative AI, look no further than Microsoft’s Bing Blog, which has posted details of what’s new in the preview release of its ChatBot and promises regular updates to summarize what they’re learning.

That includes the Chat Tones to tune its personality, Turn Counters, and other changes this time around, but my main question is, do they use Bing AI to write up the summaries?

The FTC is casually warning companies to not do that in their advertisements, despite all of the current hype around AI bots and generative technology of all types.

Does the product actually use AI at all? 

If you think you can get away with baseless claims that your product is AI-enabled, think again. In an investigation, FTC technologists and others can look under the hood and analyze other materials to see if what’s inside matches up with your claims. Before labeling your product as AI-powered, note also that merely using an AI tool in the development process is not the same as a product having AI in it.

AGI, or artificial intelligence that’s as smart as a human, isn’t here yet — see, uh, everything Bing has done lately. But if it ever does arrive, Altman is (unsurprisingly) quite excited for it, and in his latest OpenAI blog, he talks about how the company is thinking about it.

The game is to guess the secret word. The hitch is that the AI is classifying what words are alike. Yesterday’s word was “grasshopper,” and the AI thought “ant” was closer than “cricket.” Maybe that’s true if you’re analyzing texts to predict the next word — after all, there’s a fable about an ant and a grasshopper — but “cricket” and “grasshopper” are synonyms!

Remember that cool video game where we could pretend a chatbot was an AI with multiple personalities and watch it play along?

While Microsoft has only publicly admitted to playing with how many turns you get and tweaking the AI’s “tone”, the reality is that Bing just doesn’t answer fun questions like those anymore. It’ll end the conversation as soon as you ask one. Lame!

The Vanderbilt Hustler reports the school’s Peabody Office of Equity, Diversity and Inclusion is apologizing after sending a message regarding the shooting at Michigan State University that was “paraphrased” from OpenAI’s ChatGPT model (via Gizmodo).

The generic-sounding email lacks any kind of personal touch, and responses to it reflect that, as noted by this quote from Vanderbilt student Laith Kayat:

Deans, provosts, and the chancellor: Do more. Do anything. And lead us into a better future with genuine, human empathy, not a robot

Clarkesworld has always been a great place to submit your short fiction because they respond fast and pay well. There’s not a lot of waiting to learn if you’ve been accepted or not. Unfortunately, the Hugo-winning magazine has been forced to temporarily stop accepting submissions because it was getting hit with too many AI-generated submissions. Submissions will reopen eventually, but editor Neil Clarke says the current tools for spotting AI-generated submissions aren’t “reliable enough.”

AI is based on low-paid labor. This interview with one of the people who help decide what Google will show you is worth a read — for starters, he says he makes $3 less per hour than his daughter, who works in fast food.

If you’ve been playing around with ChatGPT or Bing’s AI chatbot you’ll know exactly what this guy is talking about. Also, “spicy autocomplete” is very good — apologies if we steal that Mike.

From last week’s Vergecast: there’s one small problem with this Bing AI response about The Verge’s history with Elon Musk and Elon Musk impersonators.

Scientists at the University of Chicago have created Glaze, a tool that could help artists prevent their artwork from being replicated by AI art generators by invisibly mimicking a different art style.

Glaze isn’t available just yet and the team acknowledges it isn’t a perfect solution, but it could help bridge the gap while copyright protections catch up with generative AI technology.