Is restraining an artificial intelligence the best way to prevent it from slipping? Microsoft doesn’t seem to have found any other choice for its Bing-integrated chatbot. The Redmond firm announced Friday, February 17 new limitations for ChatGPT in its search engine.
Five exchanges per session
As we had seen in recent days, the new Bing’s chatbot might seem strange. The AI would also have expressed feelings close to sadness, reported many users on social networks. “The model sometimes tries to respond or reflect on the tone in which they are asked to provide answers, which can lead to a style we did not expect“, then explained Microsoft, who was working on a correction.
Developers now seem to have identified ways to address chatbot drift. The new Bing will now “focus” his answers to prevent the context of a discussion that is too long from disturbing the AI’s thinking. The conversational agent will therefore be limited to five exchanges per session. Internet users will then be invited to start a new one. Finally, Microsoft announces the cap at 50 daily interactions with the chatbot, for a total of ten sessions.
“At the end of each chat session, the context must be cleared so that the model is not confused. Just click on the broom icon to the left of the search box to get a fresh start“explains Microsoft.
An alternative solution in development?
In its press release, the company says that the majority of searches can be completed in less than five exchanges with the AI. Beyond 15 interactions, the responses of the artificial intelligence would be too compliant, and would not bring any added value to the user, noted Microsoft experts during their last update. Concentrating responses into sessions of five interactions should thus improve overall relevance. However, the group’s engineers seem to be working on a more practical alternative solution to avoid the artificial restriction of the service.
“We will explore expanding chat session caps to further improve search and discovery experiences“, explains Microsoft. In the middle of the test phase, the new Bing is not available to all Internet users. The revamped search engine will be publicly accessible once the tests are completed.