Fed up with the Bing AI chatbot’s attitude? Now you can change its personality
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Microsoft’s Bing chatbot now offers a choice of personalities for all users, now that the rollout of the Bing Chat Mode selector is complete.
This news was shared on Twitter by Mikhail Parakhin, head of Microsoft’s Advertising and Web Services division, as noted by MS Power User (opens in new tab).
Now almost everyone – 90% – should see the Bing Chat Mode selector (the tri-toggle). I definitely prefer Creative, but Precise is also interesting – it’s much more factual. See which one you like. The 10% who are still in the control group should start seeing it today.March 1, 2023
As you can see, at the time of the tweet, 90% of Bing chatbot users had the tri-toggle chat selector that allows you to switch between three different personalities for the AI (Precise, Balanced, or Creative).
The selector was then rolled out to the remaining control group (10%) during the course of yesterday, so everyone should have it by now. That’s good news for those who want more options when it comes to the chatbot’s answers to their questions.
Earlier this week, we saw other work on the AI to reduce so-called “hallucinations” (where the chatbot gives inaccurate information or simply makes a mistake). Work has also been done to make instances where Bing simply doesn’t respond to a query become less common.
While that’s all good, it seems that a new stumbling block has been introduced at last count with the latest version of the chatbot that has the personality picker – namely, a ‘something went wrong’ error when requesting the ChatGPT powered AI .
In the Twitter thread above, there are a few complaints along these lines, so hopefully this is something Microsoft is already looking into.
Analysis: Creative for the win? Maybe for now…
No doubt there will be a lot of experimentation with the chat modes to determine exactly how these three personalities differ.
So far, the “Creative” setting seems to be getting the most positive feedback, and it’s probably the one that many Bing users are looking for. Simply because this is where the AI will have the most free hand, and so will appear more human – rather than ‘Precise’ mode, which is more like a direct answer to a query. (No doubt kind of defeats the point of having an AI do your searches, anyway).
‘Balanced’ is a middle ground between the two, so that can of course entice lovers of compromise.
Initial feedback indicates that in creative mode, Bing provides more detailed answers, not just adding a more personal touch, but seemingly fleshing out answers with greater depth. That will be helpful and will probably lead to it becoming the more popular choice. Mainly because you’re going to get the more interesting — or maybe occasionally eccentric or even bizarre — reactions in this setting.
Microsoft may need to look into working on the Balanced setting to be a more compelling choice, especially if it sees traffic moving heavily to the Creative option.
That said, the popularity of the latter is likely partly tied to how new the AI is, attracting people who are curious and just want to mess around with the chatbot to see what they can get Bing to say. Those types of users will no doubt grow tired of playing with the AI quickly, which paints a different picture of personality use once the dust settles a bit more.
In any case, tweaking Bing’s personalities is something that’s bound to happen all the time, and maybe we’ll even get more options beyond these first three eventually. Come on, Microsoft, we all want to see ‘Angry’ Bing in action, or maybe a ‘Disillusioned’ chatbot (or how about an ‘Apocalypse Survivor’ setting?). No?