Microsoft to school Bing AI after reports of chatbot's hysteria surface

Following reports that its chatbot was insulting and manipulating users' emotions, Microsoft has announced that it would implement conversation limits on Bing AI.

The chatbot's functions will now be limited to 50 questions per day and five per session, according to a blog by Microsoft published on Friday. 

"Very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model in the new Bing. To address these issues, we have implemented some changes to help focus the chat sessions," read the blog. 

"Starting today, the chat experience will be capped at 50 chat turns per day and 5 chat turns per session. A turn is a conversation exchange which contains both a user question and a reply from Bing." 

Longer chat sessions, with 15 or more queries, could cause Bing to be repetitious "or be prompted/provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or in line with our designed tone," warned an earlier blog by the tech giant. 

Bing team plans to school its chatbot

According to the Bing team, data shows that the vast majority of people find the answers they're looking for within five turns, and only about one percent of chat conversations have 50+ messages. 

When users reach the five-topic limit per session, Bing will prompt them to begin a new topic. Microsoft believes that deleting a conversation after only five questions ensures that "the model won't get confused."

The action was taken in response to stories of Bing's "unhinged" discussions and a lengthy back-and-forth with Bing that The New York Times reported. 

In this back-and-forth, the chatbot claimed to love the author and keep them up at night. 

The time period of these restrictions is not immediately known, but Microsoft is still attempting to school Bing's tone. 

Earlier this week, the business said that it did not "fully envision" users of its chat interface for "social entertainment" or as a means of more "general discovery of the world."

OpenAI's ChatGPT-powered Bing 

However, despite the restrictions, Bing's chat features are claimed to be getting better every day, with technical issues being fixed and bigger weekly dumps of changes to enhance search and responses, noted some media reports. 

Meanwhile, Microsoft has urged users to keep offering input so that its AI chatbot can improve Bing's search and discovery capabilities, in the recent blog.

The OpenAI's ChatGPT-powered Bing has been in the headlines since its launch earlier this month and since garnered both praise and criticism. 

The recently updated search engine from Microsoft can swiftly explain almost anything it discovers online, write music and recipes, and more.