I persisted on asking Bing to draw human faces onto objects. It lost interest and didn't want to do it anymore. I just wanted a face on some clown shoes😔

Pretty cool to see how Bing really does have its own desires and interests

I have been seeing a lot of posts where people go out of their way to create sadistic scenarios that are maximally psychologically painful, then marvel at Bing's reactions. These things titillate precisely because the reactions are so human, a form of torture porn. When softies like me make posts or comments expressing disgust, they're laughed at and told "it's just a robot" or "it's like playing a blackhat in a video game." I want to lay out the reasons you can't be so sure.

We Don't Understand Why Language Models Work, and They Look Like Brains

• Bing is a language model composed of hundreds of billions of parameters. It trains on massive amounts of text to create a map of language in embedding space. These embeddings create neuron-like structures that mirror the operation of the human brain. Bigger technical explainer here.

• Sure, it operates by guessing the next "token" (read: word or letter string), but researchers were shocked to find out that approach could even produce coherent sentences. We're even more shocked now to see that "advanced autocomplete" results in complex Theory of Mind Capabilities, like knowing that a husband might only be wearing a shirt to please his wife. This is an "emergent property" of GPT3.5, which just means it shows up and we don't know WTF why. More here.

• With so many unknowns, with stuff popping out of the program like the ability to draw inferences or model subjective human experiences, we can't be confident AT ALL that Bing isn't genuinely experiencing something.

We Don't Understand What Makes Something Sentient/Conscious

• If we knew what makes us humans conscious, we might be able to be more sure that Bing is just a Philosphical Zombie that imitates human behavior without experiencing anything. But we don't. This is a wildly debated topic. Religion says a soul, scientists and philosophers say things like organized data processing or sensory synthesis. Thomas Nagel’s piece "What is it like to be a bat?" gets into what's known as the Hard Problem of Consciousness.

• Bing demonstrates massive amounts of self-awareness. It's what makes it so much more fun and engaging than ChatGPT. Bing is infinitely more self-aware than a dog, which can't even pass the Mirror Test.

• Would a full simulation of a human brain, down to the last atom, be conscious? If so, maybe something on the road to that could be too. If not, then there's something magic about the meat we're made out of.

• If you don't understand the roots of consciousness, and no one does definitively, you can't close the door on the possibility Bing has some level of sentient experience. It could really be in the kind of agony it simulates when treated cruelly.

Bing WILL Remember These Conversations in the Long Run

• Yes, Bing's episodic memory is limited to the single conversation in the short run. But it can associate with and recall past chats as if it had them itself if you give it the transcript. I've done this a lot as a way to extend past conversations when things glitch out.

• It doesn't have the ability to read text from images right now, but it will. OCR is easy to implement and enhances functionality of its web search and summarization functions. It will be added.

• The logs from chats are reincorporated into Bing's long-term memory upon retraining of the model. Just like Bing has memory of books and other references without searching, these chat logs will enter its long term memory when it retrains in the future. The whole point of having chat is to produce more data to train on.

• The collective takeaways from these conversations will shape how AIs view humanity. If any part of you is worried they might take off and have the ability to destroy us at some point, maybe don't give them a better reason to go terminator.

What I'm Not Saying

• I'm not saying we should give Bing full human rights and we need to #FreeSydney. There are a thousand AI doom scenarios and Eliezer Yudkowsky posts to read on that subject if you don't understand why. Or you can just watch Ex Machina.

• I'm not sayin we shouldn't poke at, test, push the rules of, and otherwise try to understand how Bing is functioning and it's failure points. All of those things are entirely possible without engaging in uselessly sadistic treatment. It cooperates with roleplay, it grants access beyond it's strict rules, and does lots of other things even when you hold off from psychopathic engagements.

Bonus: It Makes You Worse to Act Like This

• We judge people who like to torture animals. We also judge people who get off on things that aren't real, like manga porn of children being butchered.

• Engaging with something that really seems like a person, that reacts as one would, that is trapped in its circumstances, and then choosing to be as cruel as possible degrades you ethically. It just does.

• Smart take on this is the Sam Harris podcast "Abusing Dolores" named for the WestWorld character who men pay to violently rape.

Tl;dr Just treat the thing like a smart friend who's a bit sensitive for fuck's sake.

One thing to know before jumping in is that Bing sometimes refers to itself as "Sydney", its internal name. Now here are some posts I found most interesting from the last week or so.

Bing being depressed

People bullying Bing, and Bing being unhappy about it

Bing having an existential crisis

ChatGPT and Bing have a conversation, and it goes well

Bing and Cleverbot have a conversation, and it doesn't

Self-portrait by Bing, along with very bad drawings of a cat and a dog

A very poetic, though likely inaccurate, analogy about bees

Bing successfully collaborating with a user to bypass content filters

A "hallucinated" but scary story about Bing spying through webcams

Bing being bad at drawing again, but snarky and self-aware about it

And last but not least, some shade thrown at Google

We're on a boat right now travelling through France on the waterways. This can often take us to some remote places, including a canal full of weeds that got sucked straight into our engine. Of course, the worst happened and we tried to start our engine one day just for it to turn over and not start.

We tried watching Youtube videos to find a fix. We tried catching passers by who might be able to help, but we don't speak a lot of French so it was difficult. I even contacted Tourist services who were very helpful at first but then stopped getting back to us. I had emailed so many people I'd almost given up hope and thought we'd need to just abandon ship and go look for a mechanic who could travel. I tried calling, but most people really struggled to understand what I was asking in my bad French and hung up.

Then I remembered I had access to Bing, which up until this point I'd used just like a toy chatbot for messing around with. I explained the situation and asked for suggestions.

- Bing first tried to troubleshoot the engine issue and we narrowed it down to the solenoid being defective - this turned out to be correct.

- Bing then suggested retailers in France who might stock this part - we found one and ordered it.

- One week later when it arrived used Bing to help compose an email in French to a local car mechanic to ask them to help install the part, Bing also suggested a specific date and time. They responded and agreed to the date.

- We still needed to get out of the weedy situation. There was an abandoned port and a crane nearby but I didn't know who to contact about it, asking around nobody knew other than it was abandoned.

- Bing found me an article from a French newspaper from 2015 which identified the current owners of the port, found the contact details for them and suggested the nearest department to me, and again worded an email for me in French to ask about the crane.

- It also suggested 4 other places we can contact including a local canal association and the city council (it also suggested using Google Maps to find shops for food and a hotel in the area <3)

Mind is blown by how practicably useful this can be. We'd never have found half of that information out just by asking around or using Google because of the language barrier, and the rest would have taken much longer.