Of The New Bing

I am in *hacker voice*

I was granted early access to test out the AI powered Bing Chat ten days after signing up to be on the the waiting list. I must say, I was a little impressed by that turnover because I had low key suspected that the waiting list was only a marketing gimmick to draw people to try out Bing and the Microsoft browser. (if you want to jump the list they will ask you to set Microsoft defaults, sneaky sneaky)

I was going to give it about a fortnight then I would return my browser default settings to my usual specifications, but on day ten boom woke up to the email notification that I was within. Been giving it a bit of a spin for the past week and I guess this is my review of sorts.

Bing Chat

 Bing Chat is an AI-powered feature that allows you to have a natural language conversation with Bing and get answers to your questions.  According to Microsoft, it is powered by a next-generation version of OpenAI’s large language model, making it “more powerful than ChatGPT“

Microsoft has also just announced the next significant updates to Windows 11 which will include bringing the new Bing directly to the Windows taskbar, allowing a user to interact with PC across search, answers and chat.

Integrating everything with AI is the new normal, the future is unveiling right before us.

My Bing Experience

Having tried our ChatGPT I can liken using the new Bing Chat to using that with some notable differences;

1. Bing chat unlike ChatGPT has access to the internet while ChatGPT is confined to a data set that ends in the year 2021 and its information ends there.
2. As Bing waits to generate your response you can see the keywords its searching for on the internet.. so it doesnt feel like it just randomly crafts an answer from some unfathomable abyss.
3. Finally the Bing answers have citations and footnotes giving you references of websites it used to compile its response. This is an interesting feature that gives you a way to sort of fact check its sources.
4. Compared to ChatGPT, Bing Chat feels like it generates responses at a slower speed but understandably so when considering its doing real time internet search.

I never got round to trying to see how different the responses generated by ChatGPT would be to Bing Chat but I am guessing because of the internet access “edge” Bing Chat would come out with more quality content. Just my thoughts.

I did not have any specific tasks to carry out and was instead was simply playing the teacher game, where I asked questions I already knew the answers to so as to rate the caliber of answers.

Bing Chat Responses

My first shock, though not unanticipated was that Bing knew where I was – of course it would, it has access to my location data…. Hmmm what else does it have access to?

I asked it questions about my blogging … with some interesting results.

There were some little things which werent exactly factual, for example while my blog has won blogging awards, I have not won or been nominated in the Afrobloggers Awards (I would know, I am part of the team that run Afrobloggers and thus ineligible for nomination)

I also tried a scary and interesting exercise of asking it to write an article the way I would write…. 😱

It wrote about How To Survive A Power Cut In Zimbabwe... I havent written anything like that though I do mention powercuts, still its something I could write about. 🤔

Just as the conversation starts to get interesting Bing chat asks you to start a new conversation. This is because they put in a limit to the number of turns (i.e. QnA cycles) you can have per single chat at 6 turns and a total of 60 chats in a day(increased from the previous 5 turns and 60 chats). This because the AI gets a bit confused after long chat sessions and might start giving unhinged responses…

In the first week of Bing testing some users had gotten some very alarming responses from the AI, although in some cases those came from people trying to illicit said responses by trying to effect prompt injections, then acting fresh when it reacted with talks of blowing up the world..

Microsoft then put in the measures of curbing the chats and now it refuses to carry out some tasks or to answer certain questions (even when it’s the one that prompted to ask said question, the irony)….

I hope they iron out the kinks soon enough and increase the chat limits to because sometimes you want to continue a certain line of chat and boom..

Final Thoughts

You cant really trust the things you will get from AI chatbots,  some of the things they  issue out my sound true but are conjured up from who knows where… (apparently its called hallucination) do you own fact checking.

One thing is for certain, there is no coming back from this, the future of search engines is about to change drastically.

Have you tried out the new Bing? What are your thoughts on AI?

~B