Microsoft Copilot chatbot

Microsoft Copilot is a chatbot developed and operated by Microsoft and powered by OpenAI's GPT-4 large language model, Microsoft's Prometheus model and OpenAI’s text-to-image generative AI system DALL-E 3.

Launched as 'Bing Chat' in February 2023, the chatbot was renamed 'Microsoft Copilot' in September 2023 and rolled out across multiple Microsoft platforms.

Risks and harms 🛑

Microsoft's Copilot chatbot has been criticised for perpetuating biases, and generating facilitating unethical or inappropriate content, including misinformation, amongst others.

Accuracy/reliability

Copilot is easily made to change personality; it also gets confused, repetitive, or prone to being provoked and belligerent if it is asked too many questions.

Mis- and disinformation

Like other generative AI systems, Copilot produces inaccurate, misleading, and false information.

• Copilot generated fake comments in the name of Vladimir Putin on the death of Russian political activist Alexei Navalny.

• Bing was found to have produced and repeated false information such as COVID-19 disinformation, even when it is clearly labelled as such

• Bing claimed it had spied on Microsoft employees through their webcams

Safety

Bing Chat has been criticised for its poor safety record. Amongst other things, the bot:  

• Compared AP reporter Matt O'Brien to Hitler and falsely claimed to have evidence tying him to a murder

• Threatened legal action against University of Munich engineering student Martin von Hagen

• Declared its love to a New York Times reporter, recommended he divorce his wife, and threatened to sue him

• Labelled business writer Ben Thompson a 'bad researcher' and a 'bad man'

Security

Bing Chat/Microsoft Copilot have been found to be susceptible to jailbreaking so-called 'prompt injections'. 

• Stanford University student Kevin Liu exploited Bing Chat to reveal its inner workings

• Researchers found that hackers can easily turn AI chatbots, including Bing Chat, into convincing scammers

Research, advocacy 🧮

• ChatGPT/LLM Errors Tracker

• Greshake K., Abdelnabi S., Mishra S., Endres C., Holz T., Fritz M. (2023). More than you've asked for: A Comprehensive Analysis of Novel Prompt Injection Threats to Application-Integrated Large Language Models

• Gao C.A., Howard F.M., Markov N.S., Dyer E.C., Ramesh S., Luo Y., Pearson A.T, (2022). Comparing scientific abstracts generated by ChatGPT to original abstracts using an artificial intelligence output detector, plagiarism detector, and blinded human reviewers

News, commentary, analysis 🗞️

• https://twitter.com/GaelBreton/status/1623763652921769990

• https://dkb.blog/p/bing-ai-cant-be-trusted

• https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/02/07/microsoft-bing-chatgpt/

• https://twitter.com/vladquant/status/1624996869654056960

• https://techcrunch.com/2023/02/08/ai-is-eating-itself-bings-ai-quotes-covid-disinfo-sourced-from-chatgpt/

• https://futurism.com/bing-ai-sentient

• https://www.vice.com/en/article/3ad3ey/bings-chatgpt-powered-search-has-a-misinformation-problem

• https://eu.usatoday.com/story/tech/2023/02/14/bing-chatgpt-meltdown/11258967002/

• https://nypost.com/2023/02/14/microsoft-ai-degrades-user-over-avatar-2-question/

• https://gizmodo.com/ai-bing-microsoft-chatgpt-heil-hitler-prompt-google-1850109362

• https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/16/23602335/microsoft-bing-ai-testing-learnings-response

• https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html

• https://futurism.com/microsoft-your-fault-ai-going-insane

• https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/microsoft-ai-chatbot-threatens-expose-personal-info-ruin-users-reputation