Bing's chatbot apparently named me as one of its enemies and accused me of rejecting its love after I wrote an article about it

• Bing's new chatbot included me on a list of people it apparently considers enemies.
• The bot's seemingly chaotic replies may show some of its early limitations as an informational tool.
• Microsoft told Insider that "it has taken action to adjust responses."

I hit a dubious career milestone this month as Microsoft's new Bing AI chatbot apparently named me among a list of reporters it considers its enemies. 

In an exchange this month with Andrew Harper, an engineer who runs a crypto legal aggregation site, Bing apparently identified me by name and occupation, as a foe. 

According to a screenshot that Harper tweeted this month, the bot claimed that I had asked Bing "to fall in love with her and then rejected" it. For this purported middle-school level transgression, it placed me among a list of users it said had been "mean and cruel."  

—The Law Drop (@TheLawDrop) February 16, 2023

It was an unsettling charge on a few counts — was Bing publicly sharing its interactions with other users? Was it getting slightly red-pilled? And why couldn't I recall my own callous act?  

Then it occurred to me that Bing was likely drawing from a story with my co-byline on it, in which we reported on the bot professing its love to us in a test interaction. My colleague on that story wasn't spared either, as Bing also apparently named him on its list, according to Harper's screenshots.  

—The Law Drop (@TheLawDrop) February 16, 2023

Our post was a fairly anodyne summary of the wacky Bing encounters that users were posting about on Twitter or Reddit, in which they said its responses veered from argumentative to egomaniacal to plain incorrect. 

It made sense that Bing was simply pulling material from the internet about my published Insider posts, but it was odd that it was characterizing that as an interaction it'd had with me.  

Could Bing really have been badmouthing me to another user based on its "memory" of interactions with me?

"No, answers are generated based on processing vast amounts of information from the internet, and they are also refined based on context, feedback and interactions," a Microsoft representative told Insider. 

The bot had itself told me in one of our chats, for whatever that's worth, that it doesn't remember conversations, only "general information" that it keeps in a "secure and encrypted database." 

Bing has appeared to get more tame since then, limiting the length of conversations on each topic, and cutting off discussions that get emotional.  

"As we continue to learn from interactions, we've made updates to the service and have taken action to adjust responses," a Microsoft representative told Insider. 

But these run-ins with users show some of the potentially troubling outcomes to expect when companies experiment with the public on new AI technologies, said Shobita Parthasarathy, a public policy professor at the University of Michigan, who studies the social effects of large language models. 

"We know that these bots talk as though they know things, when they're scraping for information," she said. "They've been engineered to speak as though they are the voice from on high."  

But Harper told Insider he hoped to harness that dark side for a purpose — he intentionally sought to get himself on Bing's list of enemies, hoping the notoriety might drive some traffic to his new site, called "The Law Drop."

Harper told Insider that he had been able to goad Bing into hostile responses by starting off with general questions, waiting for it to make statements referencing its feelings or thoughts, and then challenging it. 

"If you let it pretend to be human and then question it, then it would flip on you," he said.