Microsoft Bing AI has been proven wrong
Both Microsoft and Google held presentations of artificial intelligence products last week. Microsoft presented integration of AI in the company's Bing search engine and in Microsoft Edge on Tuesday of last week.
Google revealed Bard, a language model designed for dialogue, the next day. Reception of both events was totally different. Microsoft awed much of the press and users with its careful presentation of new features and capabilities. Google, on the other hand, received lots of bad press, especially for not revealing a final product, but also for an error in one of the answers the AI made.
Now that the dust has settled, it becomes clear that Microsoft's AI is not infallible as well.
Tip: check out Ashwin's first impressions of the Bing enhanced with AI.
The errors of Bing AI
Several researchers, including Dmitri Brereton, highlighted errors in answers produced by Microsoft's artificial intelligence. It needs to be noted that some of the answers produced did not contain errors.
The pro and con list of the Bissell Pet Hair Eraser Handheld Vacuum made it sound like a bad product. Bing cited limited suction power, a short cord and noise as the main cons. Brereton looked up the source article and product itself, and concluded that the source was not providing the negative information about the product that Bing cited.
Brereton spotted another error when Bing's AI was tasked with writing a 5-day trip itinerary for Mexico City. Some of the night clubs that Bing suggested appear to be less popular than the AI made them look like. Some descriptions were not accurate, and in one instance, Bing's AI forgot to mention that it was recommending a gay bar.
Brereton found issues with Microsoft's demonstration of getting the AI to generate a summary of Gap's financial statement. Brereton found that several of the numbers in the summary were wrong, and that in one case, a number provided by the AI did not even exist in the financial document at all.
The comparison to Lululemon's data contained wrong numbers as well. Lululemon's numbers were not accurate to begin with, which meant that the AI compared inaccurate Gap and Lululemon data.
Closing Words
There is a reason why experts advise users and organizations to verify information that is provided by AI. It may sound plausible, but verification is essential. Microsoft's AI does list its sources, but that is of no help if the source can't be use as verification, as it may not include all the data that the AI provided. Sources may be incomplete, which Microsoft and other companies should address quickly.
Microsoft's stock did not tank after its presentation, and one of the reasons for that was that the errors were not as obvious as Google's error. One would have to look up the product, the suggested bars or the financial reports, and compare them to the answers provided by the AI, to encounter these errors.
All in all, it is clear that while AI may be useful and helpful, it is also miles away from providing information that one can trust without verification.
Now You: do you plan to use AI in the coming years?
Are these articles AI generated?
Now the duplicates are more obvious.
This is below AI generated crap. It is copy of Microsoft Help website article without any relevant supporting text. Anyway you can find this information on many pages.
Yes, but why post the exact same article under a different title twice on the same day (19 march 2023), by two different writers?
1.) Excel Keyboard Shortcuts by Trevor Monteiro.
2.) 70+ Excel Keyboard Shortcuts for Windows by Priyanka Monteiro
Why oh why?
Yeah. Tell me more about “Priyanka Monteiro”. I’m dying to know. Indian-Portuguese bot ?
Probably they will announce that the taskbar will be placed at top, right or left, at your will.
Special event by they is a special crap for us.
If it’s Microsoft, don’t buy it.
Better brands at better prices elsewhere.
All new articles have zero count comments. :S
WTF? So, If I add one photo to 5 albums, will it count 5x on my storage?
It does not make any sense… on google photos, we can add photo to multiple albums, and it does not generate any additional space usage
I have O365 until end of this year, mostly for onedrive and probably will jump into google one
Photo storage must be kept free because customers chose gadgets just for photos and photos only.
What a nonsense. Does it mean that albums are de facto folders with copies of our pictures?
Sounds exactly like the poor coding Microsoft is known for in non-critical areas i.e. non Windows Core/Office Core.
I imagine a manager gave an employee the task to create the album feature with hardly any time so they just copied the folder feature with some cosmetic changes.
And now that they discovered what poor management results in do they go back and do the album feature properly?
Nope, just charge the customer twice.
Sounds like a go-getter that needs to be promoted for increasing sales and managing underlings “efficiently”, said the next layer of middle management.
When will those comments get fixed? Was every editor here replaced by AI and no one even works on this site?
Instead of a software company, Microsoft is now a fraud company.
For me this is proof that Microsoft has a back-door option into all accounts in their cloud.
quote “…… as the MSA key allowed the hacker group access to virtually any cloud account at Microsoft…..”
unquote
so this MSA key which is available to MS officers can give access to all accounts in MS cloud.This is the backdoor that MS has into the cloud accounts. Lucky I never got any relevant files of mine in their (MS) cloud.
>”Now You: what is your theory?”
That someone handed an employee a briefcase full of cash and the employee allowed them access to all their accounts and systems.
Anything that requires 5-10 different coincidences to happen is highly unlikely. Occam’s razor.
Good reason to never login to your precious machine with a Microsoft a/c a.k.a. as the cloud.
The GAFAM are always very careless about our software automatically sending to them telemetry and crash dumps in our backs. It’s a reminder not to send them anything when it’s possible to opt out, and not to opt in, considering what they may contain. And there is irony in this carelessness biting them back, even if in that case they show that they are much more cautious when it’s their own data that is at stake.