These are Microsoft’s Bing AI secret rules and why it says it’s named Sydney
Illustration: The Verge
Microsoft’s new Bing AI keeps telling a lot of people that its name is Sydney. In exchanges posted to Reddit, the chatbot often responds to questions about its origins by saying, “I am Sydney, a generative AI chatbot that powers Bing chat.” It also has a secret set of rules that users have managed to find through prompt exploits (instructions that convince the system to temporarily drop its usual safeguards).
We asked Microsoft about Sydney and these rules, and the company was happy to explain their origins and confirmed that the secret rules are genuine.
“Sydney refers to an internal code name for a chat experience we were exploring previously,” says Caitlin Roulston, director of communications at Microsoft, in a statement to The Verge….
