The Bing chatbot is powered by a kind of artificial intelligence called a neural network (Image: Microsoft)
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Microsoft will start limiting conversations on its new Bing chatbot to 5 questions per session and 50 questions per day, the company announced on Friday.
After a chat session hits 5 turns, you’ll be prompted to start a new topic. Context will also be needed to be cleared after each chat session so that the model doesn’t get confused. The broom icon to the left of the search box will let you do that.
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In a previous blog post, Microsoft detailed what it learnt over the one-week period that the new AI-powered Bing has been up, saying that its chatbot can “become repetitive or be prompted/provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or in line with our designed tone.” The new restrictions have been implemented in an attempt to address these issues.
Bing seems to suggest that these limitations will be unnoticed by most users, though, highlighting that the vast majority of users finds the answers they’re looking for within 5 turns and that only around 1% of chats exceed 50 messages.
Earlier this week, reports of Bing’s “unhinged” conversations emerged, with multiple users sharing their untoward conversations with the AI on Twitter. Microsoft seemed to admit in its previous blog post that it didn’t fully expect people to use Bing the way they’re using it: “One area where we are learning a new use-case for chat is how people are using it as a tool for more general discovery of the world, and for social entertainment.”
Regardless, the company says that it’s committed to improvements on a daily basis, so hopefully, these odd behaviours will be corrected with time.
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