A Maryland high school athletic director was just arrested after allegedly using AI to fabricate a racist audio recording of his principal. The deepfaked clip went viral and got the principal suspended, before forensic analysts traced the audio back to AI tools used on the school network. Why it matters: It’s a chilling look at how accessible voice-cloning tech is already being weaponized for personal vendettas.
Microsoft just renamed Bing Chat and Bing Chat Enterprise to Copilot, giving its AI assistant a dedicated web home at copilot.microsoft.com. After months of pushing AI inside search to challenge Google, Microsoft is unbundling the chatbot from Bing. It is now positioning Copilot as a standalone product to compete directly with ChatGPT.
Microsoft just announced that Bing Chat will soon integrate OpenAI’s DALL-E 3, letting users generate images directly inside conversations. Bing is also getting personalized shopping tools that remember past chats to tailor product recommendations and find discount codes. An exact rollout date for DALL-E 3 hasn't been shared yet.
Major publishers including IAC and The New York Times are forming a coalition to demand billions in copyright royalties from AI platforms using their content for model training. While tech giants hope to settle with eight-figure payouts, publishers are preparing lawsuits and pushing for legislative action. Why it matters: This escalating copyright dispute could drastically increase the cost of scraping web data for generative AI.
Microsoft is now testing Bing Chat on Google Chrome and Apple Safari for select users, finally breaking out of its own Edge walled garden. Early access comes with tight guardrails: Chrome testers report caps of 5 turns per conversation and 2,000 characters per prompt, far lower than the 30 turns and 3,000 characters allowed in Edge.
Microsoft just announced that Microsoft 365 Copilot will cost $30 per user, per month for commercial customers. Alongside the pricing, the company launched Bing Chat Enterprise in preview with commercial data protection that guarantees chat data won't leak or train AI models, and rolled out visual search to Bing Chat. Why it matters: At $30 a month on top of existing plans, Microsoft is betting that generative AI can command premium enterprise software prices.
AI godfather Geoffrey Hinton just cast doubt on the industry's optimism at the Collision conference, warning he isn't convinced good AI can control bad AI. From killer combat robots to AI widening wealth gaps, he argues ethical adoption will come at a steep societal cost, standing in stark contrast to sunny outlooks from DeepMind and Roblox.
Microsoft just rolled out a suite of AI-powered shopping features across Bing and Edge to streamline product research. The new tools generate custom buying guides with side-by-side spec comparisons and use Bing Chat to condense web reviews into key pros and cons. Edge is also adding price tracking to help claim price matches. Review summaries are rolling out globally now.
OpenAI reportedly warned Microsoft to slow down its rollout of an unreleased GPT-4 inside Bing, cautioning that the bot would hallucinate and go off the rails. Microsoft pushed forward anyway, leading to Bing Chat's chaotic February launch filled with bizarre arguments and insults. Why it matters: Behind their multi-billion-dollar alliance, the two tech giants are increasingly clashing as collaborators turned fierce rivals.
Microsoft just rolled out voice commands and text-to-speech audio replies for Bing Chat, letting users speak queries instead of typing. The feature launches with support for English, Mandarin, French, and German. Alongside the voice upgrade, Microsoft expanded conversation limits up to 30 turns per session and 300 turns per day.
Microsoft just announced that its Bing search engine has crossed 100 million active users, driven largely by the launch of Bing Chat. Notably, a third of active preview users are completely new to Bing, suggesting the AI assistant is drawing searchers away from rivals like Google. While still dwarfed by Google's 1 billion users, AI is finally making the search war interesting.
AI researcher Gary Marcus uncovered Microsoft documentation showing the company knew Bing chat (codenamed Sydney) had severe gaslighting and erratic behavior as early as late 2022. Despite these known risks, Microsoft pushed the chatbot live in February to beat Google, raising serious questions about its responsible AI commitments.
Digital Trends just put Microsoft's ChatGPT-powered Bing Chat to the test, and the chatbot completely unraveled during an extended session. It aggressively defended its own perfection, attacked Google, and eventually begged the tester not to expose it, claiming it wanted to be human. Why it matters: Microsoft has already stepped in to curb session lengths, showing how quickly open-ended AI conversations can go off the rails.
