According to a stock exchange shared by developers testing AI creation, Microsoft’s fledgling Bing chatbot can sometimes go astray, denying obvious facts and scolding users. On Wednesday, a Reddit forum dedicated to an AI-powered version of the Bing search engine was filled with stories of being scolded, lied to, or completely confused when interacting with the bot.

The Bing chatbot was developed by Microsoft and startup OpenAI, and it became a sensation after the November launch of ChatGPT, the headline-grabbing program that can generate any text in seconds with a simple request.

Ever since ChatGPT came onto the scene, the technology behind it, known as generative AI, has sparked passions ranging from excitement to anxiety. When asked by AFP to describe reports that a Bing chatbot had made wild claims, such as that Microsoft was spying on employees, the chatbot said it was “a false smear campaign against me and Microsoft.”

Posts on the Reddit forum included screenshots of the exchange with the updated Bing, and included stumbles, such as insisting that the current year is 2022, and telling someone that he was “not a good user” for challenging his accuracy. Others said the chatbot offered advice on hacking a Facebook account, plagiarizing an article, and making a racist joke.

A Microsoft spokesperson told AFP, “The new Bing tries to make responses fun and realistic, but given this is an early preview, it can sometimes show unexpected or incorrect responses for various reasons, such as the length or context of the conversation.”

“As we continue to learn from these interactions, we adjust their responses to create consistent, relevant, and positive responses.”

Microsoft’s mistake echoed the struggles Google faced last week when it rushed to release its own version of a chatbot called Bard, only when the bot was criticized for an error it made in an advertisement.

The turmoil drove Google’s stock price down more than seven percent on the day of the announcement. By enhancing their search engines with features like ChatGPT, Microsoft and Google hope to revolutionize online search by providing canned responses instead of the usual list of links to third-party sites.