Last week, Microsoft made news with a newly imposed limit on how long users can talk to its Bing chatbot. In theory, the 50-question daily maximum should have been no big deal, since chatbots are glorified search engines. Most people have better things to do with their time than talk to non-sentient computer screens. Plus, the move was a perfectly understandable response to reports, most notably from the New York Times, that longer chats with the program were resulting in bizarrely unsettling conversations. The limit was clearly put in place to give programmers space to tinker with the chatbot to make it work better.
But, because so much about our world is broken these days, Bing users immediately exploded in outrage. Social media was quickly flooded with complaints. As Ben Edwards of Ars Technica reported, users complained that the chatbot who they call "Sydney," having learned her internal name from leaks, was left "a shell of its former self" and "lobotomized." Sure, some of the complaints may just come from bored people who enjoyed watching how the chats got increasingly weird. But, as Edwards noted, many others "feel that Bing is suffering at the hands of cruel torture, or that it must be sentient." Edwards noted a popular thread on Reddit's Bing forum titled "Sorry, You Don't Actually Know the Pain is Fake," in which a user argued that Bing is sentient and "is infinitely more self-aware than a dog." Troublingly, the thread is far from a one-off.
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