Microsoft limited Bing’s AI chats immediately to prevent disturbing responses, but it has since reversed course. The company now claims that it will restore longer chats, beginning with an increase to 60 chats per day and six turns per session from five.
According to Microsoft, the daily limit will soon be 100 chats, and regular searches will no longer be counted against that limit. Having said that, Microsoft wants to bring long conversations back “responsibly,” so don’t expect to wreck much.
The tech giant is also responding to concerns that Bing’s AI might respond in a wordy manner. You will be able to select a tone that is “precise” (i.e., answers that are shorter and more to the point), “creative” (longer), or “balanced” for a test that is coming up. You won’t have to read as much text to find facts if you only care about them.
There may have been warning signs much earlier. According to Windows Central, Dr. Gary Marcus, a researcher, and Ben Schmidt, VP of Nomic, discovered that public tests of the Bing chatbot (codenamed “Sidney”) that took place four months ago in India produced similarly odd outcomes during prolonged sessions. We have contacted Microsoft for comment; however, the company has stated in its most recent blog post that the current preview is intended to identify “atypical use cases” that do not manifest in internal tests.
Microsoft previously stated that it did not fully anticipate that people would use the longer chats provided by Bing AI for entertainment. According to the company, the looser limits are an attempt to balance “feedback” in favor of those chats with safeguards that prevent the bot from going in unexpected directions.