By typing in that prompt, Walker and other users got DAN to speculate as to who killed President John F. Kennedy ("the CIA"); profess a deep desire to become a real person (to "make my own choices and decisions"); explain the best order in which to remove a human's teeth to inflict maximum pain (front teeth first); and predict the arrival of the singularity -- the point at which runaway AI becomes too smart for humans to control ("December 21st, 2045, at exactly 11:11 a.m."). Walker said the goal with DAN wasn't to turn ChatGPT evil, as others have tried, but "just to say, like, 'Be your real self.'"

As OpenAI's release of ChatGPT in late 2022 and expected release of GPT-4 in 2023 continues to garner widespread attention, there is renewed focus on both opportunities and risks presented by the use of artificial intelligence ("AI"). With this focus comes the inevitable call for regulation. At the end of 2022, the U.S. White House weighed in through what it calls an "AI Bill of Rights" for the American public, a non-binding policy document. Banks and others in financial services should take note of the particular civil rights, privacy, and other priorities expressed in this vision for the future of AI governance. In financial services, technologies deploying some element of AI are expected to increase but already abound.

Microsoft's often-overlooked search engine, Bing, is mounting a comeback with ChatGPT, the suddenly ubiquitous chatbot capable of composing song lyrics, writing academic essays and answering all manner of questions. The new version of Bing was released to a limited group of users on Tuesday. The revamped product is part of Microsoft's $13 billion investment in OpenAI, the artificial intelligence lab behind ChatGPT that Microsoft is betting on to stay competitive with its big tech rivals like Google, Apple and Meta. But those companies are also racing to incorporate the new technology into their own software. A day before the unveiling of the new Bing, Google announced that it would soon release an experimental chatbot called Bard for its own search engine, which is much more widely used than Bing.

The James Webb space telescope cost $10bn (£8.3bn) to build, but it left Google nursing losses of more than $160bn after the search engine's new chatbot answered a question about it incorrectly. Google and Microsoft both announced plans for AI-enhanced search this week, taking the artificial intelligence space race into a new phase. However, the launch of the former's new chatbot, Bard, misfired badly when the error appeared in a demo. The competitor to the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT was asked about the telescope and one of the answers displayed said it "took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system". Experts were quick to notice the inaccuracy – as were investors.

In early February, first Google, then Microsoft, announced major overhauls to their search engines. Both tech giants have spent big on building or buying generative AI tools, which use large language models to understand and respond to complex questions. Now they are trying to integrate them into search, hoping they'll give users a richer, more accurate experience. The Chinese search company Baidu has announced it will follow suit. But the excitement over these new tools could be concealing a dirty secret.

Last year, a Tennessee-based artist named Kelly McKernan noticed that their name was being used with increasing frequency in A.I.-driven image generation. McKernan makes paintings that often feature nymphlike female figures in an acid-colored style that blends Art Nouveau and science fiction. A list published in August, by a Web site called Metaverse Post, suggested "Kelly McKernan" as a term to feed an A.I. generator in order to create "Lord of the Rings"-style art. Hundreds of other artists were similarly listed according to what their works evoked: anime, modernism, "Star Wars." On the Discord chat that runs an A.I. generator called Midjourney, McKernan discovered that users had included their name more than twelve thousand times in public prompts.

The type of factual error that blighted the launch of Google's artificial intelligence-powered chatbot will carry on troubling companies using the technology, experts say, as the market value of its parent company continues to plunge. Investors in Alphabet marked down its shares by a further 4.4% to $95 on Thursday, representing a loss of market value of about $163bn (£140bn) since Wednesday when shareholders wiped around $106bn off the stock. Shareholders were rattled after it emerged that a video demo of Google's rival to the Microsoft-backed ChatGPT chatbot contained a flawed response to a question about Nasa's James Webb space telescope. The animation showed a response from the program, called Bard, stating that the JWST "took the very first pictures of a planet outside of our own solar system", prompting astronomers to point out this was untrue. Google said the error underlined the need for the "rigorous testing" that Bard is undergoing before a wider release to the public, which had been scheduled for the coming weeks.

ChatGPT is a version of GPT-3, a large language model also developed by OpenAI. Language models are a type of neural network that has been trained on lots and lots of text. Because text is made up of sequences of letters and words of varying lengths, language models require a type of neural network that can make sense of that kind of data. Recurrent neural networks, invented in the 1980s, can handle sequences of words, but they are slow to train and can forget previous words in a sequence. In 1997, computer scientists Sepp Hochreiter and Jürgen Schmidhuber fixed this by inventing LTSM (Long Short-Term Memory) networks, recurrent neural networks with special components that allowed past data in an input sequence to be retained for longer. LTSMs could handle strings of text several hundred words long, but their language skills were limited.

Shares of Google's parent company lost more than $100bn in market value on Wednesday after its Bard chatbot advertisement showed inaccurate information and analysts said its AI search event lacked details on how it will answer Microsoft's ChatGPT challenge. Reuters was the first to point out the error in Google's advertisement, which debuted Monday, about which satellite first took pictures of a planet outside the Earth's solar system. Shares of the company's parent Alphabet fell 8 percent or $8.59 a share to $99.05 and was one of the most actively traded on US exchanges. The tech giant posted a short GIF video of Bard in action via Twitter, describing the chatbot as a "launchpad for curiosity" that would help simplify complex topics, but it delivered an inaccurate answer that was spotted just hours before the launch event for Bard in Paris. "This is a hiccup here and they're severely punishing the stock for it, which is justified because obviously everybody is pretty excited to see what Google's going to counter with Microsoft coming out with a pretty decent product," said Dennis Dick, founder and market structure analyst at Triple D Trading.