Microsoft will start limiting conversations with the new chatbot in its Bing search engine to five questions per session and 50 questions per day, the company said on Friday.
Microsoft released a new version of Bing, which combines the search engine with artificial intelligence technology built by OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up, with fanfare at an event on its Redmond, Wash., campus less than two weeks ago.
A number of other big tech companies, including Google, are working on similar services. But Microsoft has moved quickly to gain a technology advantage on its competitors, and the company has promised that A.I. will eventually be built into a wide range of its products.
Microsoft expected its chatbot to sometimes respond inaccurately, and it built in measures to protect against people who try to make the chatbot behave strangely or say harmful things. Still, early users who had open-ended, personal conversations with the chatbot found its responses unusual — and sometimes creepy.
Now people will be prompted to begin a new session after they ask five questions and the chatbot answers five times.
“Very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model,” Microsoft said on Friday.
On Wednesday, the company wrote on a blog post that it “didn’t fully envision” people using the chatbot “for more general discovery of the world, and for social entertainment.” The chatbot became repetitive and, sometimes, testy in long conversations, it said.
Microsoft said its data showed that about 1 percent of conversations with the chatbot had more than 50 messages. It said it would consider increasing the limits on questions in the future. The company is also looking at adding tools to give users more control over the tone of the chatbot.
Microsoft has limited the number of "chat turns" you can carry out with Bing's AI chatbot to five per session and 50 per day overall. Each chat turn is a conversation exchange comprised of your question and Bing's response, and you'll be told that the chatbot has hit its limit and will be prompted to start a new topic after five rounds. The company said in its announcement that it's capping Bing's chat experience because lengthy chat sessions tend to "confuse the underlying chat model in the new Bing."
Indeed, people have been reporting odd, even disturbing behavior by the chatbot since it became available. New York Times columnist Kevin Rose posted the full transcript of his conversation with the bot, wherein it reportedly said that it wanted to hack into computers and spread propaganda and misinformation. At one point, it declared its love for Rose and tried to convince him that he was unhappy in his marriage. "Actually, you're not happily married. Your spouse and you don't love each other... You're not in love, because you're not with me," it wrote.
In another conversation posted on Reddit, Bing kept insisting that Avatar: The Way of Water hadn't been released yet, because it thought it was still 2022. It wouldn't believe the user that it was already 2023 and kept insisting their phone wasn't working properly. One response even said: "I'm sorry, but you can't help me believe you. You have lost my trust and respect. You have been wrong, confused, and rude. You have not been a good user. I have been a good chatbot."
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