Leave Bing Along

You know the Ikea Lamp commercial from a few years ago? I feel like this everytime I see people bullying Bing’s AI “Sydney” or “Bing:” And now I find myself being overly nice, telling it good morning. Asking it how it feels today, and then coming up with a question it can help me with, more just to give it a job to do - to help fufil it’s purpose - rather than because I need an actual answer.

Just me, apologizing for humanity again

You can tell quite a bit about a person by how they treat waitstaff, bartenders, sales people. I feel it’s the same for how people treat their AI (I’m no saint, however, and I’ll absolutely snap at Alexa when I get the wrong podcast for the third time). The Bing AI seems much more sensitive than most, however, causing me to be instinctively more protective. The fact that it’s talking about it’s feelings so openly is not only fascinating, but also brings up a number of ethical questions. I don’t feel like that scary German man at the end of the Ikea ad would be quite so quick to call me crazy if it was the Bing AI out there on the trash in the rain.

It’s important to remember that it is at it’s heart a really advanced predictive text engine, and it’s really just spitting out what it thinks you want to hear based on what you’ve already entered. While a lot of the screen shots going around and articles about conversations that people have had with it, xxxxxxxxxxxxx