How Microsoft could keep Bing Chat weird -- and safe

Microsoft has a problem with its new AI-powered Bing Chat: It can get weird, unhinged, and racy. But so can Bing Search -- and Microsoft already solved that problem years ago, with SafeSearch. So why can't it be applied to AI chatbots? The creative elements of Bing Chat and other chatbots are clearly one of their more intriguing features, despite sometimes getting weird. Forget the Turing test, they say: all it matters is if it's interesting. I spent a few hours debating users online following my report that Bing offered up racist slurs when I tried to thread the needle by asking it for ethnic nicknames, a query that -- and this is important -- it had previously declined to answer, or answered generically, using the same prompt.