4 ms·

I've been impressed with Bing Chat, surprisingly so given how much negative talk there is about it. For quick and simple fact checks, for which I would normall

I've been impressed with Bing Chat, surprisingly so given how much negative talk there is about it. For quick and simple fact checks, for which I would normally reflexively hit Google, it's a huge improvement. No need to be exposed to clickbait, scams, or excessively ad-heavy results. Right now it requires you to use either the Edge browser (I don't want to switch), or the Bing app, which I reluctantly do. If they ever make it available to other browsers I can see my Google usage falling dramatically.

croes 4y ago
> No need to be exposed to clickbait, scams, or excessively ad-heavy results. That's because it's new, like google search in the beginning. Wait until they monetize it
siva7 4y ago
I've used Google today for a quick product comparison search and it's awful. The first three results were sponsored ads and the next pages are just low-quality seo rigged content that didn't answer my question.
- basch 4y ago
  Having Bing chat attached to bing doesn’t exactly solve this. It still constantly pulls from low quality sources. I asked a question about Satan and it cited Answers in Genesis. Product reviews regularly return seo garbage. Product review categories in particular would benefit from whitelisting, by hand, things like americas text kitchen, consumer reports, rtings.
  - AlotOfReading 4y ago
    I get the other bits, but what's the issue with citing Genesis? It doesn't use the names for Satan, but the serpent is commonly understood as the same entity. Are you looking for e.g. Job instead?
    - basch 4y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answers_in_Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answers_in_Genesis https://answersingenesis.org/ https://answersingenesis.org/
      - AlotOfReading 4y ago
        Yeah, I see why that would be problematic. I misunderstood the original statement as citing the book of genesis itself, which seems a lot more reasonable.
- bitshiftfaced 4y ago
  It seems particularly bad lately. The pattern I've noticed is: * A totally pointless introduction paragraph, devoid of info. * Big ad * A sort of teaser sentence in large font so that it appears to be the length of a paragraph. High noise to information ratio. * Larger ad that loads as you scroll, so you're more likely to accidentally hit it * Another sentence with high noise to info ratio. * Repeat. I think one of the SEO perks of this pattern is how it takes forever to find the information that you know must be somewhere on the website, so users seem more "engaged" because they are scrolling and spending more time visiting the site.
  - topicseed 4y ago
    Also generates more ad impressions as you scroll and see these ads.
    - pmoriarty 4y ago
      Looks like Google has turned into AltaVista.
      - deleted 4y ago
        [deleted]
      - MichaelMoser123 4y ago
        You made my day with that comment!
        MichaelMoser123 4y ago
        not yet, you need to 'join in the waitlist' and be granted access to the 'new bing' - otherwise no access to the chat mode.
- slowmotiony 4y ago
  I wanted to check this point and asked Bing to suggest some good business laptops below $800. It suggested me a $2k dell xps, a $1.5k LG gram and some piece of shit chromebook. I guess we'll never have objective product comparisons free of seo bullshit.
ashlance 4y ago
There's a Chrome extension to trick Bing into believing you're browsing via Edge. Works well enough for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bing-chat-unblocker/kaenogcjldffhicfkjeklbcebalfembd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bing-chat-unblocke...
- walrus01 4y ago
  there's also plenty of firefox extensions to switch your useragent
  - arcanemachiner 4y ago
    For the lazy, here's the user agent I use: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/111.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/110.0.1587.69
galaxytachyon 4y ago
Just curious, what browser are you using? I gave up Chrome a while ago with how bloated and invasive it has become. Edge is better at least and I think Firefox is the best choice if you want privacy. Brave and other stuff have some bad reputation...
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  I use Safari.
- SoftTalker 4y ago
  Edge and Chrome are two sides of the same coin.
  - galaxytachyon 4y ago
    And each side of the coin has different engravings. It is different enough for me to use it and it doesn't seem to be so bloated like chrome. Not sure how true it is but Microsoft core business is not about ads and selling user data. Google has a lot more incentive to be invasive than Microsoft and it shows in their browser.
dgudkov 4y ago
>No need to be exposed to clickbait, scams, or excessively ad-heavy results. Not yet. But it will be monetized eventually, of course. Most probably through ads. And, as we know very well, big tech corps simply are not able to do monetization in an ethical way.
erinnh 4y ago
I have to check Bing's sources when I use it anyway, because what it says is often simply wrong. I asked it what my local cafeteria had on its lunch menu today. It answered with full confidence. It turns out, it was completely wrong though. It had mixed the lunch options and completely hallucinated another one. Stuff like this just makes me really wary using it. I have to fact check everything every time and for more complicated things I cant be sure if *I* am correct.
- onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
  You can't get correct answers from an LLM for most things you'd want to ask it. It's useful for predicting the future with some level of error that's probably better than you could do on some topic you know little about - and for generating text in the style of someone else about some subject where accuracy doesn't matter. That's pretty much it. Until LLMs work different, Chat-GPT - even if it gets to version 9000 - is never going to be able to tell you what's on the menu today at Chez Panisse, unless they build in some API for Chez Panisse to answer that query direction - in which case, you're not really using AI at all...
  - Karunamon 4y ago
    This assertion is easily disproven by about five minutes of using even GPT3, and more quantitatively, by 4's documented results on standardized testing. I'm not sure what kinds of questions you are asking in order to make broad statements like "You can't get correct answers from an LLM for most things you'd want to ask it", but this is so far off base from both the research, the documentation, and my own experience that I think we're talking about two different things. Please stop with the middlebrow dismissal, doubly so when the dismissals aren't even accurate.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
      If you need correct information - it's not really useful at all if something is mostly correct 95% of the time. If you don't need correct information, ChatGPT is great.
jxy 4y ago
Change your browser's user agent to Edge.
- LeoPanthera 4y ago
  Huh, this actually works! I never imagined it would be so simple. Thank you.
freediver 4y ago
> Right now it requires you to use either the Edge browser (I don't want to switch) More precisely it requires to see Edge in the user agent. Any browser that allows settings user-agent per site (I use Orion) allows you to use Bing chat.
namdnay 4y ago
> Right now it requires you to use either the Edge browser And we’re back to the Microsoft of the 90s apparently!
bloqs 4y ago
The ckickbait, scams and ad heavy results will return, don't worry. Microsoft is expert at poisoning their own successes. Just wait for the rampant commercialisation of results, and various efforts to infect the model from SEO types over the long term
davidthewatson 4y ago
Me too, though there's an uncanny valley hiding in the spectrum of responses from bing right now. That is, I'd ask it to summarize the difference in views from a novelist, a computer scientist, a media theorist, and a philosopher across more than a half decade and was shocked at how good the quick summary paragraphs were considering my question was something like "compare and contrast the beliefs and values of David Foster Wallace, Alan Kay, McLuhan, and Byung Chul-Han, respectively. Then I asked another question and bing went off the rails getting 3 paragraphs wrong and then going from English into Spanish for no apparent reason other than I presume its source material had parallel language issues. It was surprising how good bing's right answers were given how bad its wrong answers were, especially considering that it had caught the fact that while there's a lineage of ideas from early media critics to present, the tech had changed dramatically underneath those criticisms and bing was aware enough of that substrate to note it in a separate "meta" paragraph about that change of tech, for lack of a better term.
nashashmi 4y ago
You can also use it on Skype
doodlesdev 4y ago
> Right now it requires you to use either the Edge browser (I don't want to switch) Or faking your user agent... https://github.com/anaclumos/bing-chat-for-all-browsers https://github.com/anaclumos/bing-chat-for-all-browsers
jayant_kaushik 4y ago
The Edge browser is essentially is Chrome under the hood. With cosmetic changes and some Microsofty features. I switched to Edge and would never go back to chrome. Big reason is - the vertical tabs feature and tab grouping. At anytime I have around 300-400 tabs open and vertical tabs + grouping makes browsing through them a breeze and I always know where the tab is I’m looking for. Takes a few days to get used to vertical tabs, but once you do, you’ll question the decision of other browsers to have horizontal tabs where you can’t even read the title when many are open.
strus 4y ago
> No need to be exposed to clickbait, scams, or excessively ad-heavy results. Just bot hallucinating, which is way worse than anything you mentioned, as there is now way to determine if GPT is telling you the truth or not without actual manual check in other sources.

croes 4y ago

> No need to be exposed to clickbait, scams, or excessively ad-heavy results. That's because it's new, like google search in the beginning. Wait until they monetize it

siva7 4y ago

I've used Google today for a quick product comparison search and it's awful. The first three results were sponsored ads and the next pages are just low-quality seo rigged content that didn't answer my question.

basch 4y ago
Having Bing chat attached to bing doesn’t exactly solve this. It still constantly pulls from low quality sources. I asked a question about Satan and it cited Answers in Genesis. Product reviews regularly return seo garbage. Product review categories in particular would benefit from whitelisting, by hand, things like americas text kitchen, consumer reports, rtings.
- AlotOfReading 4y ago
  I get the other bits, but what's the issue with citing Genesis? It doesn't use the names for Satan, but the serpent is commonly understood as the same entity. Are you looking for e.g. Job instead?
  - basch 4y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answers_in_Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Answers_in_Genesis https://answersingenesis.org/ https://answersingenesis.org/
    - AlotOfReading 4y ago
      Yeah, I see why that would be problematic. I misunderstood the original statement as citing the book of genesis itself, which seems a lot more reasonable.
bitshiftfaced 4y ago
It seems particularly bad lately. The pattern I've noticed is: * A totally pointless introduction paragraph, devoid of info. * Big ad * A sort of teaser sentence in large font so that it appears to be the length of a paragraph. High noise to information ratio. * Larger ad that loads as you scroll, so you're more likely to accidentally hit it * Another sentence with high noise to info ratio. * Repeat. I think one of the SEO perks of this pattern is how it takes forever to find the information that you know must be somewhere on the website, so users seem more "engaged" because they are scrolling and spending more time visiting the site.
- topicseed 4y ago
  Also generates more ad impressions as you scroll and see these ads.
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    Looks like Google has turned into AltaVista.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
    - MichaelMoser123 4y ago
      You made my day with that comment!
      - MichaelMoser123 4y ago
        not yet, you need to 'join in the waitlist' and be granted access to the 'new bing' - otherwise no access to the chat mode.
slowmotiony 4y ago
I wanted to check this point and asked Bing to suggest some good business laptops below $800. It suggested me a $2k dell xps, a $1.5k LG gram and some piece of shit chromebook. I guess we'll never have objective product comparisons free of seo bullshit.

ashlance 4y ago

There's a Chrome extension to trick Bing into believing you're browsing via Edge. Works well enough for me: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bing-chat-unblocker/kaenogcjldffhicfkjeklbcebalfembd https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/bing-chat-unblocke...

walrus01 4y ago
there's also plenty of firefox extensions to switch your useragent
- arcanemachiner 4y ago
  For the lazy, here's the user agent I use: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/111.0.0.0 Safari/537.36 Edg/110.0.1587.69

galaxytachyon 4y ago

Just curious, what browser are you using? I gave up Chrome a while ago with how bloated and invasive it has become. Edge is better at least and I think Firefox is the best choice if you want privacy. Brave and other stuff have some bad reputation...

LeoPanthera 4y ago
I use Safari.
SoftTalker 4y ago
Edge and Chrome are two sides of the same coin.
- galaxytachyon 4y ago
  And each side of the coin has different engravings. It is different enough for me to use it and it doesn't seem to be so bloated like chrome. Not sure how true it is but Microsoft core business is not about ads and selling user data. Google has a lot more incentive to be invasive than Microsoft and it shows in their browser.

dgudkov 4y ago

>No need to be exposed to clickbait, scams, or excessively ad-heavy results. Not yet. But it will be monetized eventually, of course. Most probably through ads. And, as we know very well, big tech corps simply are not able to do monetization in an ethical way.

erinnh 4y ago

I have to check Bing's sources when I use it anyway, because what it says is often simply wrong. I asked it what my local cafeteria had on its lunch menu today. It answered with full confidence. It turns out, it was completely wrong though. It had mixed the lunch options and completely hallucinated another one. Stuff like this just makes me really wary using it. I have to fact check everything every time and for more complicated things I cant be sure if *I* am correct.

onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
You can't get correct answers from an LLM for most things you'd want to ask it. It's useful for predicting the future with some level of error that's probably better than you could do on some topic you know little about - and for generating text in the style of someone else about some subject where accuracy doesn't matter. That's pretty much it. Until LLMs work different, Chat-GPT - even if it gets to version 9000 - is never going to be able to tell you what's on the menu today at Chez Panisse, unless they build in some API for Chez Panisse to answer that query direction - in which case, you're not really using AI at all...
- Karunamon 4y ago
  This assertion is easily disproven by about five minutes of using even GPT3, and more quantitatively, by 4's documented results on standardized testing. I'm not sure what kinds of questions you are asking in order to make broad statements like "You can't get correct answers from an LLM for most things you'd want to ask it", but this is so far off base from both the research, the documentation, and my own experience that I think we're talking about two different things. Please stop with the middlebrow dismissal, doubly so when the dismissals aren't even accurate.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 4y ago
    If you need correct information - it's not really useful at all if something is mostly correct 95% of the time. If you don't need correct information, ChatGPT is great.

jxy 4y ago

Change your browser's user agent to Edge.

LeoPanthera 4y ago
Huh, this actually works! I never imagined it would be so simple. Thank you.

freediver 4y ago

> Right now it requires you to use either the Edge browser (I don't want to switch) More precisely it requires to see Edge in the user agent. Any browser that allows settings user-agent per site (I use Orion) allows you to use Bing chat.

namdnay 4y ago

> Right now it requires you to use either the Edge browser And we’re back to the Microsoft of the 90s apparently!

bloqs 4y ago

The ckickbait, scams and ad heavy results will return, don't worry. Microsoft is expert at poisoning their own successes. Just wait for the rampant commercialisation of results, and various efforts to infect the model from SEO types over the long term

davidthewatson 4y ago

Me too, though there's an uncanny valley hiding in the spectrum of responses from bing right now. That is, I'd ask it to summarize the difference in views from a novelist, a computer scientist, a media theorist, and a philosopher across more than a half decade and was shocked at how good the quick summary paragraphs were considering my question was something like "compare and contrast the beliefs and values of David Foster Wallace, Alan Kay, McLuhan, and Byung Chul-Han, respectively. Then I asked another question and bing went off the rails getting 3 paragraphs wrong and then going from English into Spanish for no apparent reason other than I presume its source material had parallel language issues. It was surprising how good bing's right answers were given how bad its wrong answers were, especially considering that it had caught the fact that while there's a lineage of ideas from early media critics to present, the tech had changed dramatically underneath those criticisms and bing was aware enough of that substrate to note it in a separate "meta" paragraph about that change of tech, for lack of a better term.

nashashmi 4y ago

You can also use it on Skype

doodlesdev 4y ago

> Right now it requires you to use either the Edge browser (I don't want to switch) Or faking your user agent... https://github.com/anaclumos/bing-chat-for-all-browsers https://github.com/anaclumos/bing-chat-for-all-browsers

jayant_kaushik 4y ago

The Edge browser is essentially is Chrome under the hood. With cosmetic changes and some Microsofty features. I switched to Edge and would never go back to chrome. Big reason is - the vertical tabs feature and tab grouping. At anytime I have around 300-400 tabs open and vertical tabs + grouping makes browsing through them a breeze and I always know where the tab is I’m looking for. Takes a few days to get used to vertical tabs, but once you do, you’ll question the decision of other browsers to have horizontal tabs where you can’t even read the title when many are open.

strus 4y ago

> No need to be exposed to clickbait, scams, or excessively ad-heavy results. Just bot hallucinating, which is way worse than anything you mentioned, as there is now way to determine if GPT is telling you the truth or not without actual manual check in other sources.