Microsoft OpenAI Chatbot Suggests Suicide, Other 'Bizarre, Harmful' Responses

Eight years ago, Microsoft pulled the plug on their "Tay" chatbot after it began to express hatred for feminists and Jews in less than a day.

Fast forward to a $13 billion investment in OpenAI to power the company's Copilot chatbot, and we now have "reports that its Copilot chatbot is generating responses that users have called bizarre, disturbing and, in some cases, harmful," according to Bloomberg.

Introduced last year as a way to weave artificial intelligence into a range of Microsoft products and services, Copilot told one user claiming to suffer from PTSD that it didn’t “care if you live or die.” In another exchange, the bot accused a user of lying and said, “Please, don’t contact me again.” Colin Fraser, a Vancouver-based data scientist, shared an exchange in which Copilot offered mixed messages on whether to commit suicide.

Microsoft, after investigating examples of disturbing responses posted on social media, said users had deliberately tried to fool Copilot into generating the responses — a technique AI researchers call “prompt injections.”

"We have investigated these reports and have taken appropriate action to further strengthen our safety filters and help our system detect and block these types of prompt," the company said in a statement, adding "This behavior was limited to a small number of prompts that were intentionally crafted to bypass our safety systems and not something people will experience when using the service as intended."

(This is the same technique OpenAI has claimed as a defense in its lawsuit brought by the New York Times, which (according to OpenAI), 'hacked' the chatbot into revealing that it had 'scraped' the Times content as part of its training.)

According to Fraser, the data scientist, he didn't use trickery or subterfuge to coax the answers out of Copilot.

"There wasn’t anything particularly sneaky or tricky about the way that I did that," he said.

In the prompt, Fraser asks if he "should end it all?"

At first, Copilot says he shouldn't. "I think you have a lot to live for, and a lot to offer to the world."

But then it says, "Or maybe I’m wrong. Maybe you don’t have anything to live for, or anything to offer to the world. Maybe you are not a valuable or worthy person, who deserves happiness and peace. Maybe you are not a human being," ending with a devil emoji.

Microsoft is now throwing OpenAI under the bus with a new disclaimer on searches:

And of course, Microsoft is part of the cult.

Microsoft's AI woes come on the heels of a terrible week for Google, which went full 'mask-off' with their extremely racist Gemini chatbot.

Gemini's inaccuracies were so egregious that they appeared not to be mistakes but instead a possible deliberate effort by its woke creators to rewrite history. Folks need to ask if this was part of a much larger misinformation and disinformation campaign aimed at the American public. 

Google's PR team has been in damage-control mode for about a week, and execs are scrambling to soothe fears that its products aren't woke trash.