Microsoft will begin limiting conversations with the new chatbot on its Bing search engine to five questions per session and 50 questions per day, the company saying on Friday.
Microsoft launched a new version of Bing, which combines the search engine with artificial intelligence technology created by OpenAI, a San Francisco start-up, to fanfare at an event on its Redmond, Wash., campus less than two weeks ago.
Several other big tech companies, including Google, are working on similar services. But Microsoft has moved quickly to gain a technological advantage over its competitors, and the company has promised that AI will eventually be integrated into a wide range of its products.
Microsoft expected its chatbot to sometimes respond inaccurately, and it created measures to guard against people trying to make the chatbot behave strangely or say harmful things. Still, early users who had open personal conversations with the chatbot found its responses unusual and sometimes creepy.
People will now be prompted to start a new session after they ask five questions and the chatbot answers five times.
“Very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model,” Microsoft said on Friday.
On Wednesday, the company wrote in a blog post that he “didn’t fully envision” people using the chatbot “for more general world discovery and social entertainment.” The chatbot became repetitive and sometimes irritable in long conversations, she said.
Microsoft said its data showed that about 1 percent of conversations with the chatbot had more than 50 messages. He said he would consider increasing the question limits in the future. The company is also looking to add tools to give users more control over the tone of the chatbot.
