Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing gets a personality makeover you may not like

Microsoft has applied some further fine-tuning to its Bing AI, upping some chat limits and making changes to one of the chatbot’s personalities.

Chats have now been extended to allow up to 15 sessions per day, with the maximum length of a session pushed out to 10 queries (meaning a total of 150 queries is now your daily limit).

Microsoft has slowly but surely been pushing up those chat limits since the AI first launched and it was heavily restricted (to 5 sessions and 50 queries daily) when the chatbot’s behavior was observed going seriously awry in longer sessions.

But the more interesting change, as revealed by Yusuf Mehdi, Corporate VP & Consumer Chief Marketing Officer at Microsoft, is optimizing the ‘Balanced’ personality for better performance.

As you may be aware, there are three personalities available for Microsoft’s AI. Balanced is the middle setting for the chatbot, a halfway house between Precise and Creative, which remain unchanged.

Precise offers more concise and business-like answers, more akin to a standard search, whereas Creative gives the AI more free rein in its replies – with Balanced lying in-between the two as a compromise option.

Analysis: Precise, A Bit Less Precise, and Creative?

As with any compromise, deciding exactly where to draw the line can be a tricky affair. However, it seems that Microsoft is shifting that line to a more conservative position with this latest change.

With Balanced now giving “shorter, quicker responses,” that sounds clearly more in line with the Precise setting, rather than Creative which is where the AI is allowed more freedom to ramble – and frankly, to be more interesting and human-like.

Therefore, moving the Balanced dial more towards the conservative end of the spectrum could be viewed as making the Bing AI a bit more straightlaced and, well, boring.

The whole point of having the three personalities is to give users the choice of how the AI will respond, so if they’re not happy with their interactions with the ChatGPT-powered entity, they can switch things around. But now it feels like there’s slightly less choice in terms of there being a ‘very conservative’ setting, a ‘somewhat conservative’ option, and a ‘freer rein’ choice.

Why has Microsoft moved in this direction? Our guess is that folks who want a more human-like chat experience are using Creative and maybe wouldn’t dream of dipping a toe into Balanced anyway. Perhaps few people are using Balanced overall, so tuning it towards Precise may tempt those on the latter into making use of the middling option – whereas those on Creative are going to stick there, most likely, as they want the AI to be as interesting and open as is inhumanly (ahem) possible.

Whatever the case, we can expect further tuning, and indeed likely other personality choices, down the line. We may even get a mode whereby the Bing AI can impersonate famous celebrities, too, if leaks are on the money. And that would likely help push user numbers even higher, when there are already a good few folks signed up to test drive the chatbot.

Via MS Power User (opens in new tab)

Darren is a freelancer writing news and features for TechRadar (and occasionally T3) across a broad range of computing topics including CPUs, GPUs, various other hardware, VPNs, antivirus and more. He has written about tech for the best part of three decades, and writes books in his spare time (his debut novel – ‘I Know What You Did Last Supper’ – was published by Hachette UK in 2013).