Microsoft’s Bing chatbot now offers personalization options for all users, and the rollout of the Bing chat mode selector is complete.
Mikhail Parakhin, head of Microsoft’s advertising and web services division, shared the news on Twitter, VIP (opens in a new tab).
Almost everyone – 90% – should see the Bing chat mode selector (triple toggle) by now. Of course I prefer Creative, but Precise is also fun – it’s more real. 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, 90% of Bing chatbot users have a triple toggle chat selector that lets you switch between the AI’s three different personalities (Precise, Balanced, or Creative) when tweeting.
The remaining control group (10%) then had the selector rolled out to them throughout yesterday, so everyone should have it by now. This is good news for those who want more options in how their chatbot responds to queries.
Earlier this week, we saw other work on AI to reduce so-called “illusion” (chatbots providing inaccurate information, or simply making mistakes). Patches were also made to ensure that Bing would not respond to queries at all less frequently.
While this is all well and good, looking at the latter, the latest version of the chatbot introduces a new stumbling block with a personality selector — namely the “something went wrong” error message when querying the ChatGPT-powered AI .
In the twitter thread above, there were some similar complaints, so hopefully Microsoft is looking into this already.
Analysis: Creativity wins? Maybe temporarily…
No doubt there will be a lot of experimentation with chat modes to see how these three personalities differ.
The “Creativity” setting seems to be getting the most positive feedback so far, and it’s likely what many Bing users are looking for. Simply because this is where the AI is freest, it looks more like a human — and not more like a “precise” mode of a direct answer to a search query. (In any case, arguably defeats the point of having an AI perform the search to some extent).
“Balance” is a middle way in between, so naturally it might tempt fans to compromise.
Initial feedback suggests that in creative mode, Bing provides more detailed answers, which not only add more personal touches, but seem to flesh out more in-depth responses. This will be useful and may lead to it becoming a more popular choice. Especially with this setup, you’ll get more amusing — or maybe occasionally eccentric, even eccentric — responses.
Microsoft may need to consider the Balanced setting as a more attractive option, especially if it finds that traffic is heavily skewed towards the creative option.
That said, the popularity of the latter may have to do in part with how novel the AI is, attracting curious people who just want to hang out with chatbots and see what they can get Bing to say. Such users will no doubt get tired of toying with AI before too long, and when the dust settles, they’ll be given a different picture of their individual usage.
Regardless, tweaking Bing’s personality will undoubtedly continue to happen, and we may end up even getting more options beyond those initial three. Come on, Microsoft, we’d all like to see an “angry” Bing in action, or maybe a “disillusioned” chatbot (or how about an “Apocalypse Survivor” setup?). No?
