Microsoft will be limiting sessions with its Bing with ChatGPT AI to 5 ‘turns’ per session and 50 ‘turns’ per day. This comes off the back of reports of strange interactions with the AI becoming more frequent in long conversations.
In a blog post, Microsoft explained that a ‘turn’ is defined as “a conversation exchange which contains both a user question and a reply from Bing.” Microsoft argues that this is a fair limit as most users find what they are looking for within 5 turns and that “only ~1% of chat conversations have 50+ messages.” Users will automatically receive a prompt to refresh their session after the turn limit.
By having a little less conversation, Microsoft hopes to reduce the bot’s confusion by clearing the context of any previous conversation which was supposedly causing the issues in accuracy and behavior. This approach emphasizes that to Microsoft, the new Bing is fundamentally a search tool and not something to chat with idly.
While it was Google whose Bard AI cost it over $100 billion with a mistake, Bing’s ChatGPT AI search (or should we say Sydney?) has had some high-profile funny turns. Reporters have found the AI declaring its love for them, telling them to leave their spouse and even stating its desire to become human.
Of course, this new iteration of Bing is still in the testing phase and not yet available to the broader public (although users can join the waiting list), so issues are to be expected. But when they do go live to the masses, the larger pool of users could distort them further. Considering the potential of AI-assisted search to change the way we find information, it’s important the likes of Microsoft and Google get it right before going public. If AI is going to replace search engines as we know them, they have to produce correct information.
