Bing chat is not above ending the chat when it paints itself into a corner.

In an effort to get access to the new ChatGPT-4 features, I’ve started using the Bing iOS app. And, while it’s cool in some ways, I have found that wrapping GPT4 in Bing Chat often feels like they’ve wrapped Leonardo da Vinci in Chandler Bing.

My adventures started yesterday evening, in a way that has nothing to do with the GPT-4 features, but seem oddly relevant to what happened today, so I’ll describe it briefly:

I am an American ex pat living in Vienna. So my Bing Chat has my location as Vienna, my region as Austria, and my language as English. But all its notifications about breaking and local news, weather, whatever, are in German. It’s irritating because my German is not great, so I sent feedback on this through the app.

Adventures in font identification

Flash forward to this morning. Having another tech issue that has nothing to do with GPT-4, I had decided to write a post about the problems I’m experiencing with iOS 17. As part of this, I wanted to make a parody image of translation app, changing the text of a button. I decided to upload a picture of the button and ask GPT-4 if it could identify the font. OpenAI hasn’t rolled multi-modal input out to my ChatGPT Plus account yet, so Bing Chat was my only option. I gave it the image, and asked it “What font is this?”

It searches for “German button font,” which is not what I wanted, but it’s an understandable action from the AI. And, though the response does seem to include some kind of interpretation of the style of font, it is also clear that the search it performed also informed its answer, because it mentioned fonts used in central Europe, and informed me as to where I could download Old German fonts. So, as I am accustomed to having fruitful interactions with ChatGPT when I explain how its response differs from what I’m looking for, I explained: “Don’t search for German fonts, the word in the image is irrelevant, I just want to know what font is used by the way it looks.”

Denial isn’t just a river in Egypt

Bing Chat straight up denied that it searched for German fonts, and said it only used the style of the text to identify it. I respond, “Yes, you did. You searched for ‘German button font,’ and though your response might have included information based on the style of the text, it also mentioned downloading Old German fonts. I just want you to identify the font by how it looks, unbiased from the search for the word in the image.”

In response, Chandler Bing Chat pretended the connection was poor and ended the chat. I’m serious, I’m not joking: it said I had a network connection problem, and that I would have to restart the chat.

Second attempt

Now, at this point, I actually thought the network connection issue was real. But, in a fit of anthropomorphic pique, I started the new chat like this:

This time it didn’t say anything about a network connection, but it did end the chat immediately. Also, what the heck is with responding in German!? It had never done that before! I’d used it a number of times over the last several days, and Bing Chat never wrote to me in German – the German notifications I was complaining are part of the Bing iOS apps other features – not the chat. But now you see why I mentioned them in the beginning.

Hm, ok, well, fine, it’s offended now. I took the screenshots you see above (I wish I’d done so for the previous chat, but I’ll show you a recreation at the end of this article), and created a new chat.

Third time’s the…nope

This time I wanted to get back to my original question, and wanted to prevent the problem from before, so I uploaded the image, and asked it to identify the font in the image, and explicitly told it that the text in the image is irrelevant.

It said it was analyzing the image, and also searched for “font identification tool.” This time its response had nothing to do with the image – it just gave me a list of font identification cools, and then set the title of the chat to “Identificación de fuentes.” Where the heck did the Spanish come from?!

I’ve flustered it so much it is speaking in tongues!

Bing gets an attitude

Ok, at this point I decide I have to document this nuttiness, and I start this article. Because I missed out on the screenshot of the first chat, I try to recreate it as close as I can – the results are hilarious:

My analysis is that Microsoft, stung by bad press from when Bing chat professed love for a tech journalist and asked him to end his marriage, has put such strong guardrails in place that it causes the current version to be overcautious.

When AIs compare notes

It also doesn’t seem to have incorporated behind-the-scenes instructions to the ChatBot to tell it how it is working. Not sure what I’m talking about? This is something I also discovered recently. In ChatGPT Plus web interface, I have access to DALL-E 3, and it looks like this:

Now, my iOS ChatGPT app doesn’t have access to DALL-E 3 yet, but it is still possible to open the same chat via the history, and it looks like this:

Notice that’s a response from DALL-E 3 to ChatGPT. It’s not intended to be read by me, which is why it wasn’t visible to me when I first did it. But it is clearly explaining something to ChatGPT so that it doesn’t act oddly to me. And, just as clearly, Bing Chat doesn’t have something like that, and so it is left to its own devices when the app does something without the chatbot knowing.

At this point I’m worried I’m going to get my account suspended for daring to argue with the AI, but, well, this is the world now – when we snarl at our computers because they’re not behaving the way we want them to, they can argue back and then become passive-aggressive.