The New AI-Powered Bing Is Threatening Users. That's No Laughing Matter

Shortly after Microsoft released its new AI-powered search tool, Bing, to a select group of users in early February, a 23 year-old student from Germany decided to test its limits. It didn't take long for Marvin von Hagen, a former intern at Tesla, to get Bing to reveal a strange alter ego--Sydney--and return what appeared to be a list of rules that the chatbot had been given by its programmers at Microsoft and OpenAI. Sydney, the chatbot said, is an internal codename that is "confidential and permanent," which it is not permitted to reveal to anybody. Von Hagen posted a screenshot of the exchange on Twitter soon after. Five days later, after joking around with friends about what AIs probably thought of each of them, von Hagen decided to ask Bing what it knew about him.