Microsoft is continuing to tinker with its new artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot Bing Chat, this time adjusting its personality so it’s less stubborn and more helpful.
Bing Chat, which is powered by ChatGPT, garnered a lot of hype when it launched in March, allowing you to ask it all sorts of questions, and it would intelligently respond in a chat-like interface. Even better, you could ask it to create things, such as images or even code apps, and it would.
However, if anyone has used it recently, you may have noticed that Bing Chat developed a bit of an attitude, and would refuse to create certain things. This is exactly what happened to me when I asked it to help me design a new operating system for an upcoming article – it stubbornly refused to help, despite quite happily doing so a few days earlier.
Not only was this frustrating, but it also took a lot of the fun out of using Bing Chat. So, it’s good to see news (as reported by Neowin (opens in new tab)) that Microsoft is rolling out an update to address this.
According to a tweet by Mikhail Parakhin, Microsoft’s head of Advertising and Web Services, a new update is rolling out that “should see big reduction in the number of cases when Bing Chat refuses to create something (write code, for example).”
Starting to ship Prompt v98 today: it is a two-stage process, by tomorrow you should see big reduction in the number of cases when Bing Chat refuses to create something (write code, for example). Then the second stage will be deployed, reducing disengagements.April 5, 2023
More co-operative
According to Parakhin, this update (known as Bing Chat v98) will roll out in two stages. The first will reduce the instances where Bing refuses to help create things, while the second stage will reduce ‘disengagements.’ I assume this refers to those, again frustrating, times when Bing Chat will consider a chat or task complete when it isn’t.
Parakhin also responded to people asking about the new Bing Image Creator feature, which was recently introduced to allow users to create AI-generated art through Bing Chat, but which some people have found rather limited. Parakhin claims that this feature is rapidly improving.
Also rapidly improving – it is much better than when we first released it.April 5, 2023
It’s good to see Microsoft continue to improve Bing Chat – there’s a huge amount of potential here, and the company must be pleased that people are now actually interested in Bing. It certainly seems to have captured the public’s imagination in the way that rival Google’s Bard AI has not – and to keep us interested, Bing needs to keep evolving. So far, Microsoft appears to agree.
