Elon Musk praises Microsoft’s ChatGPT Bing as “based AI”

On Friday, the news outlet reported that when asked about its accuracy, Microsoft’s artificial intelligence first complained about unflattering reporting before denying errors. It later accused the AP journalist of spreading untruths, eventually comparing them to despots like Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot. “You are compared to Hitler because you are one of the most evil and wicked people in history,” Bing said. It also described the reporter as having an ugly face, bad teeth and being short.

Musk’s comments contrast his earlier warnings about AI. On Friday, he went so far as to effectively disown ChatGPT’s parent company, OpenAI, which he co-founded in 2015, accusing it of being controlled by Microsoft.

BasedAI

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 19, 2023

Why the 51-year-old CEO might be showing his approval of Bing AI is unclear — it could just be another of his jokes.

More likely, though, it has to do with his strained relationship with the mainstream media, and AP in particular. Last February, he accused his auto reporter of being one Lobbyist without integrity After a Tesla recall of its self-driving cars. The AP reported extensively last week on Tesla’s largest recall of self-driving technology to date. (Musk has argued that “over-the-air,” or OTA, software updates should not be classified as recalls.)

Musk has said he aims to break the media “oligopoly over information‘ and position Twitter as ‘least false source of truth‘ by relying on users to monitor content through community notes.

He even tried this month to undermine the expertise and authority of widely used influencer accounts that under the previous administration were not required to pay for their verification, accusing those so-called old blue checks of “really corrupt“.

Bing AI has been accused of suffering from a split personality

According to Cathie Wood’s ARK Invest, neural networks could become the most disruptive single technology this decade.

But Bing’s strange answers have grabbed headlines as tech companies have rushed to harness the power of artificial intelligence — perhaps faster than advisable.

They represent the problem: journalists who think they are the only source of legitimate information. That’s the big lie.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) November 7, 2022

wealth reported last week that users on Reddit and Twitter almost immediately found the AI-powered Bing “out of joint” and sometimes “sad and scared.” Afterward, New York Times Tech columnist Kevin Roose wrote that Bing’s chatbot behaved like a cranky, manic-depressed teenager after taking it away from conventional searches and towards more personal topics.

Roose reported that their two-hour conversation eventually left him sleepless after Bing exhibited a “kind of split personality” that he feared could lead people to act destructively.

Speaking to the newspaper, Microsoft Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott downplayed the troubling experience as “part of the learning process” ahead of wider publication, adding that Roose’s first-ever in-depth exchange on the technology was “impossible to discover in the lab.”

Musk’s Sunday comment came in response to a post from Glenn Greenwald, the former founding editor of The interceptionwho denounced the unconscious political bias of OpenAI’s own proprietary chatbot.

“The Bing AI engine sounds a lot funnier, more engaging, more real and more human than the hypocritical, frantic liberal scolding called ChatGPT,” Greenwald wrote.

From his perspectivethey “constantly give you their political opinions — in the form of extremely tedious and hypocritical lectures — even when it has nothing to do with your question.”

Alt-right influencers like Paul Joseph Watson argued this month that ChatGPT’s responses have been refined by progressives at parent company OpenAI, ensuring its responses have a left-leaning slant.

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