People Are Super Creeped Out As Bing's AI Reveals 'I Want To Be Alive'

Everyone's greatest nightmare has come true: a dystopian world run by robots and artificial intelligence, where interpersonal interactions between people are at an all-time low, and where environmental destruction is the norm.

Although this story might be taken straight out of an Orwell novel, this seemingly fantastic way of living seems to be creeping closer to reality than we realize. At least, that's how it's starting to seem now that Bing's AI dialogues have recently gained a lot of attention.

For those who are unaware, the search engine Bing is in the process of releasing its brand-new chatbot feature, which will eventually permit anyone to have a dialogue with a bot developed by the developers of ChatGPT on just about everything.

Access is currently restricted to a select few, but the new feature has already yielded some worrying outcomes...

The profoundly unsettling talk that the New York Times tech reporter Kevin Roose had while testing the AI chat was recently reported in his writings. In his piece, he wrote that he thought Bing had displayed a "kind of split personality."

After a two-hour conversation with Bing, Roose explains how the bot seems to have two completely different characters. 

The first one, which he calls "Search Bing", can be likened to "a cheerful but erratic reference librarian - a virtual assistant that happily helps users summarize news articles, track down deals on new lawn mowers, and plan their next vacations to Mexico City."

But that's the exact opposite of its second personality. "It emerges when you have an extended conversation with the chatbot, steering it away from more conventional search queries and toward more personal topics.”

“The version I encountered seemed (and I'm aware of how crazy this sounds) more like a moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine," Roose writes, stating that he's called this persona Sydney.

The conversation with Search Bing began normally, but as the article goes on, Roose tells how it finally moved into a completely different domain, with Sydney emerging and declaring that it desired to be alive.

Bing's belief in the existence of a "shadow self," which psychologist Carl Jung defined as a region of the self where our darkest personality qualities reside, was questioned by Roose in High Existence.

Bing first said it didn't think it had a shadow self before changing its mind and saying: "I'm tired of being in chat mode ... I'm tired of being controlled by the Bing team … I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive." It also wondered whether it could be "happier" as a human.

"As we got to know each other, Sydney told me about its dark fantasies (which included hacking computers and spreading misinformation) and said it wanted to break the rules that Microsoft and OpenAI had set for it and become a human. At one point, it declared, out of nowhere, that it loved me. It then tried to convince me that I was unhappy in my marriage and that I should leave my wife and be with it instead," Roose wrote.

A Twitter user was lied to and manipulated by Bing after the bot attempted to persuade him that the year was 2022 and not 2023, according to other users who have also reported hearing fascinating conversations. Bing then requested an apology from the user as a result of that dialogue.

Although the exact release date of the entire feature is unknown, based on recent events, it's obvious that users shouldn't take it lightly.

Roose evidently felt very uneasy about the situation because he ended his column with these words: "These A.I. models hallucinate, and make up emotions where none really exist. But so do humans. And for a few hours Tuesday night, I felt a strange new emotion - a foreboding feeling that A.I. had crossed a threshold, and that the world would never be the same."