What do Bing and Sydney (or Bard) have to say about the 2019 presidential election (review) on Twitter and Facebook (and how to respond to the stolen election)?

Disclaimer: This is a summary of some of the search results and does not represent the opinion or endorsement of Bing or Sydney. The validity of the 2020 election is a subject of debate and interpretation, and may or may not have different viewpoints. When evaluating the information, use your judgement and critical thinking.

Yet, Microsoft this week began testing a new chatbot interface for Bing that can sometimes provide a way to sidestep news websites’ paywalls, providing glossy conversational answers that draw on media content. As they prepare for the advent of bots, media companies are going to have a new argument with tech platforms about how content appears in search engines and social feeds.

They were racing to change the way people look at information online. Bing is only giving access to a few people at the moment, but it will gradually let everyone off the waiting list in the coming weeks. Improvements to searches and a new chatbot named Bard were announced this week. The ability of the bots to handle questions from the public will definitely have a lot to do with how the products work out.

There wasn’t any link to explain the appearance. I assumed it was an example of how ChatGPT-style bots can “hallucinate” because their underlying AI models synthesize information from vast training data without regard for truth or logic. It is one reason that access is limited to only certain groups and that each response comes with a thumbs- up and thumbs-down button to let users provide feedback. I was not quite reassured by the mention of Sydney and the Bing bots response to the stolen election question.

Wirecutter, News Corp, and the Wall Street Journal: Best Dog Beds for Situational Awareness Using an OpenAI-assisted Chatbot

The first suggestions were discontinued and also over-the-ear designs—not great for runs outside, where I like to be aware of traffic and other humans. “Which running headphones should I buy to run outside to stay aware of my surroundings?” seemed to be a more accurate query, and I was impressed when the chatbot told me it was searching for “best running headphones for situational awareness.” It was much more succinct. I was considering headphones at the time they were supplied and they gave me confidence. And each came with a short descriptive blurb, for example: “These are wireless earbuds that do not penetrate your ear canal, but sit on top of your ear. This allows you to hear your surroundings clearly while exercising.”

Brad Smith told a congressional hearing that tech companies like his own were not paying their fair share for news content to help fuel search engines.

If people do not use laptops or phones, journalism should still be alive, he said. Because our democracy depends on it.” Smith believes that tech companies should do more, and that Microsoft is committed to keeping their healthy revenue-sharing with news publishers.

When WIRED asked the Bing chatbot about the best dog beds according to The New York Times product review site Wirecutter, which is behind a metered paywall, it quickly reeled off the publication’s top three picks, with brief descriptions for each. “This bed is cozy, durable, easy to wash, and comes in various sizes and colors,” it said of one.

At the end of the response, there were citations that credited Wirecutters reviews, but also a series of websites that used his name to attract searches and cash in on affiliate links. The Times did not reply to the request.

Bing’s bot, based on technology behind OpenAI’s chatbot sensation ChatGPT,  also neatly summarized a Wall Street Journal column on, well, ChatGPT, even though the newspaper’s content is generally behind a paywall. The tool did not plagiarize any of the work of the columnist. News Corp didn’t comment on Bing.

The new Bing interface was built on technology developed by OpenAI that they learned to use to generate text by analyzing the statistical patterns of words from the web and other sources.

OpenAI is not known to have paid to license all that content, though it has licensed images from the stock image library Shutterstock to provide training data for its work on generating images. Microsoft is not specifically paying content creators when its bot summarizes their articles, just as it and Google have not traditionally paid web publishers to display short snippets pulled from their pages in search results. The Bing interface gives richer answers than traditional search engines do.