The Online Search Wars Got Scary. Fast.

The Daily

The New York Times

Daily News, News

4.4 • 102.8K Ratings

🗓️ 17 February 2023

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Microsoft recently released a new version of its search engine Bing that is powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, the maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT. On Valentine’s Day, after a meal with his wife, Kevin Roose, a New York Times technology columnist, had a two-hour conversation with the chatbot. The chatbot, which revealed that it identified as Sydney, told Kevin that it wanted to be human, that it loved him and that he should leave his wife. “There is something going on here that I don’t think Microsoft intended to build into a search engine,” Kevin said on today’s episode. “Something is not right.” Guest: Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times and host of the Times podcast “Hard Fork.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	From the New York Times, I'm Michael Bavaro. This is The Daily.
0:11.0	On Wednesday, my colleague, Kevin Rus, came on the show to describe a major breakthrough
0:16.7	in how we use artificial intelligence to search the Internet.
0:21.5	Soon after, Kevin met the dark side of that technology.
0:27.0	Today, the follow-up episode we didn't plan to make.
0:41.0	It's Friday, February 17th.
0:51.0	So Kevin, back so soon.
0:54.0	Back too soon.
0:56.0	Yes, it's been a wild 48 hours since our last conversation.
1:02.0	It has been wild indeed. Two days ago, you came on to talk about this new technology,
1:07.0	a search engine powered by artificial intelligence released by Microsoft.
1:11.0	The reason you're back is because you had an experience with this new search engine
1:17.0	that was so unsettling and I think important that it kind of felt like journalistic
1:22.0	malpractice to not do a follow-up and explain and disclose what happened.
1:27.0	So tell us about what happened.
1:31.0	Yes, so a couple days ago, you and I talked about Bing, the search engine from Microsoft
1:36.0	and this new AI technology that had been built into Bing that was made by open AI,
1:43.0	the makers of chat GPT.
1:45.0	Right.
1:46.0	And I said what I thought about it at the time, which was that it was a very impressive
1:50.0	and often helpful if occasionally erratic search engine.
1:55.0	And then I went and made Valentine's Day dinner and had a lovely time with my wife.
	...

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