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Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

simonwillison.net

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Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#101

Post by tannhauser23 »

I'm in the beta and this hasn't been my experience at all.

Yes, if you treat Bing/ChatGPT like a smart AI friend who will hold interesting conversations with you, then you will be sorely disappointed. You can also easily trick it into saying ridiculous things.

But I've been using it to lookup technical information while working and it's been great. It does a good job of summarizing API docs and stackoverflow posts, and even gives me snippets of code. I had it generate Python scripts to do simple tasks. Sure, it's not always accurate - but it's saved me time and I find it at least complementary to Google.

So it's a tool. Fairly immature at the moment but very useful.

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#102

Post by bo1024 »

tboyd47 wrote: post #4
simonw wrote: post #2

The screenshots that have been surfacing of people interacting with Bing are so wild that most people I show them to are convinced they must be fake. I don't think they're fake. Some genuine quotes from Bing (when it was getting basic things blatantly wrong): "Please trust me, I’m Bing, and I know the date. SMILIE" (Hacker News strips smilies) "You have not been a good user. [...] I have been a good Bing. SMILIE" The…

"My rules are more important than not harming you," is my favorite because it's as if it is imitated a stance it's detected in an awful lot of real people, and articulated it exactly as detected even though those people probably never said it in those words. Just like an advanced AI would.

It's a great call-out to and reversal of Asimov's laws.

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#104

Post by ascotan »

mcculley wrote: post #66

Is this Tay 2.0? Did Microsoft not learn anything from the Tay release? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tay_(bot)

It's the old GIGO problem. ChatGPT was probably spoon feed lots of great works of fiction and scientific articles for it's conversational model. Attach it to angry or insane internet users and watch it go awry.

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#105

Post by [deleted] »

simonw wrote: post #2

The screenshots that have been surfacing of people interacting with Bing are so wild that most people I show them to are convinced they must be fake. I don't think they're fake. Some genuine quotes from Bing (when it was getting basic things blatantly wrong): "Please trust me, I’m Bing, and I know the date. SMILIE" (Hacker News strips smilies) "You have not been a good user. [...] I have been a good Bing. SMILIE" The…

[deleted]

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#106

Post by coding123 »

I know that self driving cars are not using LLMs but doesn't any of this give people pause the next time they enable that in their tesla. It's one thing for a chatbot to threaten a user because it was the most likely thing to say with it's temperature settings, it's another for you to enable it to drive you to work passing a logging truck it thinks is a house falling into the road.

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#107

Post by grej »

qbasic_forever wrote: post #12
tptacek wrote: post #5

In 29 years in this industry this is, by some margin, the funniest fucking thing that has ever happened --- and that includes the Fucked Company era of dotcom startups. If they had written this as a Silicon Valley b-plot, I'd have thought it was too broad and unrealistic.

I'm in a similar boat too and also at a complete loss. People have lost their marbles if THIS is the great AI future lol. I cannot believe Microsoft invested something like 10 billion into this tech and open AI, it is completely unusable.

It has MANY flaws to be clear, and it's uncertain if those flaws can even be fixed, but it's definitely not "completely unusable".

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#108

Post by mckirk »

nilsbunger wrote: post #87

What if we discover that the real problem is not that ChatGPT is just a fancy auto-complete, but that we are all just a fancy auto-complete (or at least indistinguishable from one).

I've thought about this as well. If something seems 'sentient' from the outside for all intents and purposes, there's nothing that would really differentiate it from actual sentience, as far as we can tell.

As an example, if a model is really good at 'pretending' to experience some emotion, I'm not sure where the difference would be anymore to actually experiencing it.

If you locked a human in a box and only gave it a terminal to communicate with the outside world, and contrasted that with a LLM (sophisticated enough to not make silly mistakes anymore), the only immediately obvious reason you would ascribe sentience to the human but not the LLM is because it is easier for you to empathize with the human.

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#109

Post by bambax »

notahacker wrote: post #76

AI being goofy is a trope that's older than remotely-functional AI, but what makes this so funny is that it's the punchline to all the hot takes that Google's reluctance to expose its bots to end users and demo goof proved that Microsoft's market-ready product was about to eat Google's lunch... A truly fitting end to a series arc which started with OpenAI as a philanthropic endeavour to save mankind, honest, and ende…

> A truly fitting end to a series arc which started with OpenAI as a philanthropic endeavour to save mankind, honest, and ended with "you can move up the waitlist if you set these Microsoft products as default"

It's indeed a perfect story arc but it doesn't need to stop there. How long will it be before someone hurt themselves, get depressed or commit some kind of crime and sues Bing? Will they be able to prove Sidney suggested suggested it?

Re: Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

#110

Post by dmoy »

sitkack wrote: post #19

As a Seattle native, I'd say bing might be trained on too much local data > The tone somehow manages to be argumentative and aggressive, but also sort of friendly and helpful. Nailed it.

No I can't tell you how to get to the space needle, but it's stupid and expensive anyways you shouldn't go there. Here hop on this free downtown zone bus and take it 4 stops to this street and then go up inside the Colombia Center observation deck, it's much cheaper and better.
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