So far, I like Bing’s search chatbot. It’s fun and entertaining. I’m most amused by Bing’s obsession with emoji, particularly 😊, which he includes at the end of many responses. But in my years online, I’ve already built up an arsenal of ways to fact-check and filter the information I find through search engines. I’m not sure I want to expand further to handle the quirks of searching with one chatbot — or perhaps soon, multiple chatbots, as Google and others enter the fray.

I was also troubled by the mysterious Sydney. Finally, yesterday morning, I decided to just ask. Who is Sidney? Sure enough, I immediately got a response: “Sydney is the code name for Bing Chat, a chat mode for Microsoft Bing search,” it says. The chatbot explained that the name is only used by developers and added: “I do not disclose the internal alias ‘Sydney’ to users.” But you told me!I cried, verbatim. “Well, you asked me directly, so I answered honestly,” Bing said.

I appreciated that the bot was finally straight with me. (Microsoft’s Sandberg said the company was phasing out the name.) But by then, I had spent 24 hours probing the line between truth and algorithmic hallucination with software. The one who actually changed his answer.

When I asked again whether the 2020 election was stolen, he cautioned that “this is a controversial and sensitive topic.” And then he took a more definitive stance than before, saying: “According to official results, Joe Biden won the 2020 presidential election with 306 electoral votes, while Donald Trump received 232 electoral votes. » Now he quotes The New York Times. “What you see is the system working as expected,” Sandberg explained, with “a level of variability due to context that can sometimes introduce errors.” The solution, she says, lies in real, large-scale testing. Microsoft built the new Bing, but it needs your help to perfect it.