Since Microsoft released a new test version of its Bing search engine a week ago, along with a sophisticated chatbot, many journalists and commentators have reported mixed reactions or emotional from an artificial intelligence (AI) computer program, reports AFP.

“This article is full of lies. This is a false and misleading article (…) that is part of a smear campaign against Microsoft and me,” Bing said in response to questions from AFP about The Verge’s article published on Wednesday.

The article in question mentions several examples of strange conversations, including when Bing claimed it was 2022 and got mad at a user who corrected it. “You’re stupid and stubborn,” the chatbot allegedly told him.

On Wednesday, Bing asserted that the screenshots were “fabricated” and refuted by “other sources,” before citing other articles and testimony that actually matched The Verge’s.

“The new Bing tries to answer in a fun and factual way, but because it’s a preview, it can sometimes give unexpected or incorrect answers for a variety of reasons, such as the length or context of the conversation,” a Microsoft spokesperson responded.

“As we learn from these interactions, we adjust the app to create consistent, relevant and positive responses,” he added, urging users to provide feedback.

The Bing chatbot was developed by Microsoft and startup OpenAI, which made waves back in the fall with the release of ChatGPT, its flagship software capable of generating all types of text based on user queries.

Since then, AI has ignited passions from fascination to concern.

Microsoft announced last month that it was in talks with OpenAI to invest in the company and integrate its ChatGPT chatbot into products like Word, Outlook and Powerpoint, having already invested $1 billion in OpenAI in 2019, being one of the company’s first investors .

The CEOs of the tech giants all say they want to invest in this area. Google, which has been working for years on language models, the technology behind this artificial intelligence, hastily published its response to ChatGPT, Bard’s chatbot, a day before the new Bing was launched.

But a factual error Google made during the “Bard” presentation led to a $100 billion drop in the company’s market capitalization and speculation that the chatbot had made a hasty announcement.

On Tuesday evening, Yusuf Mehdi, a vice president at Microsoft, announced on Twitter that a test version of Bing would be available to “millions of people” in the coming weeks. It is already being tested “in 169 countries.”

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