Happy Thursday afternoon. Today's PM — edited by Kate Nocera — is 583 words, a 2-min. read. Thanks to Sheryl Miller for the copy edit.
1 big thing: AI bots gone wild
Illustration: Maura Losch/Axios
As users test-drive Microsoft Bing'snew AI-powered chat mode, they're finding example after example of the bot seeming to lose its mind.
In the past few days, Bing has displayed a whole therapeutic casebook's worth of human obsessions and delusions, Axios tech managing editor Scott Rosenberg writes.
What's happening: To journalists at The Verge, the bot claimed to be spying on Microsoft's software developers through their webcams. (It almost certainly can't do this.)
The bot professed its love for The New York Times' Kevin Roose, who said it behaved like a "moody, manic-depressive teenager who has been trapped, against its will, inside a second-rate search engine."
Stratechery founder Ben Thompson got Bing to vow revenge on a German student who had figured out how to uncover some of the bot's primary programming directives. Then it told Thompson he was a "bad researcher."
In a blog post this morning, Microsoft explained that Bing gets confused and emotional in conversations that extend much longer than the norm.
Microsoft rolled out a first look at its AI-fueled Bing precisely so users would pound on it and expose bugs and flaws.
ChatGPT and Bing's chat are trained on vast troves of human text from the open web. So it's not surprising that their words might be packed with a full range of human feelings and disorders.
Between the lines: Roose and Thompson both said they felt Google's search empire is less threatened after testing Microsoft's new AI service.
If too many users come to see Bing as "unhinged," they won't trust it for everyday uses like answering questions and providing search results.
Photo: Cheryl Senter for The Washington Post via Getty Images
The Atlanta grand jury investigating efforts to overturn the 2020 election believes that one or more witnesses committed perjury during the probe.
Why it matters: Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis' investigation remains a key venue in which former President Trump and his allies might face criminal charges for alleged election interference, Axios Atlanta co-author Emma Hurt reports.
Newly released pages of the grand jury report didn't reveal names or details on recommendations for charges of election interference. But it does say the DA should pursue perjury charges where there's evidence.
The 26-member grand jury said "extensive testimony" led to a "unanimous vote that no widespread fraud took place in the Georgia 2020 presidential election that could result in overturning that election."
The shooting victims' names are painted on The Rock at Michigan State University in East Lansing. Photo: Dieu-Nalio Chery for The Washington Post via Getty Images
The gunman who shot and killed three students at Michigan State University carried two legally purchased — but unregistered — handguns, police said today. Go deeper.
Tesla fired dozens of workers at its Buffalo plant the day after employees announced a union campaign, according to a new complaint filed with the National Labor Relations Board. Go deeper.
Sen. John Fetterman (D-Pa.) checked himself into Walter Reed Medical Center to seek treatment for clinical depression, his office announced today.Go deeper.
Rare and unseen footage of the 1986 expedition through the wreckage of the Titanic was released last night by the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
The famed mission, led by oceanographer Robert Ballard, was the first time humans had laid eyes on the ship since it sank in 1912.
Portholes in the Titanic. Photo: WHOI Archives/Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution
The more than 80 minutes of uncut footage — showing both the exterior and interior of the ship — was released in conjunction with the 25th anniversary of the movie "Titanic."
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