The Online Search Wars Got Scary. Fast.

Microsoft recently released a new version of its search engine Bing that is powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, the maker of the popular chatbot ChatGPT.

On Valentine’s Day, after a meal with his wife, Kevin Roose, a New York Times technology columnist, had a two-hour conversation with the chatbot.

The chatbot, which revealed that it identified as Sydney, told Kevin that it wanted to be human, that it loved him and that he should leave his wife.

“There is something going on here that I don’t think Microsoft intended to build into a search engine,” Kevin said on today’s episode. “Something is not right.”

Guest: Kevin Roose, a technology columnist for The New York Times and host of the Times podcast “Hard Fork.”

Background reading: 

• A conversation with Bing’s chatbot left Kevin “deeply unsettled.” Read the transcript.
• Microsoft knew the new technology had issues like occasional accuracy problems, but users have experienced surprising and unnerving interactions.

For more information on today’s episode, visit nytimes.com/thedaily. Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.