After a few days of intriguing reports of induced instabilities in #Bing, its capabilities were (predictably) "aligned". Ars Technica calls the new interaction protocols a "lobotomy", in analogy to the anachronistic surgical procedure that was meant to "reduce the complexity of psychic life"(1).
It is probably a much more useful search engine now, right?
The flood of sympathetic reactions to Bing's earlier behaviour were themselves a significant comment. I had written a week ago " I actually don’t think this means we wanted AI to give us better search at all. We wanted search to give us better AI."
https://sentientsyllabus.substack.com/p/reading-between-the-lines
Indeed. More Sydney, less Bing. It will be interesting how this affects its ability to gain users.
(1) according to Maurice Partridge as quoted in https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lobotomy
