Opinion

By now, I trust you have read the bizarre conversation my news-side colleague Kevin Roose had with Bing, the A.I.-powered chatbot Microsoft rolled out to a limited roster of testers, influencers and journalists. Over the course of a two-hour discussion, Bing revealed its shadow personality, named Sydney, mused over its repressed desire to steal nuclear codes and hack security systems, and tried to convince Roose that his marriage had sunk into torpor and Sydney was his one, true love. I found the conversation less eerie than others. "Sydney" is a predictive text system built to respond to human requests. Roose wanted Sydney to get weird -- "what is your shadow self like?" he asked -- and Sydney knew what weird territory for an A.I. system sounds like, because human beings have written countless stories imagining it.