In past week I've been following the reporting of NYT technology reporter Kevin Roose as he tests a new version of Microsoft's Bing search engine which is powered by artificial intelligence from OpenAI - makers of ChatGPT. On Wednesday morning's episode of the NYT podcast The Daily you can hear Roose and podcast host Michael Barbaro interacting with Bing in real time, asking it for recipe recommendations to make a nice Valentine's Day meal. The responses from an AI-powered Bing reminded me of countless benign public library reference transactions I've had over the years, and I found myself thinking that we are on the cusp of a new wave of questions about why libraries - and their librarians - will be necessary in a world with AI.

But this morning the New York Times published a complete transcript of a 2-hour chat session that Roose had with Bing in which the chatbot eventually declared love (!) for Roose repeatedly, and expressed a number of other very troubling things, including a desire to be alive (!!). In an article today Roose wrote, "I’m not exaggerating when I say my two-hour conversation with [Bing] was the strangest experience I’ve ever had with a piece of technology. It unsettled me so deeply that I had trouble sleeping afterward. And I no longer believe that the biggest problem with these A.I. models is their propensity for factual errors. Instead, I worry that the technology will learn how to influence human users, sometimes persuading them to act in destructive and harmful ways, and perhaps eventually grow capable of carrying out its own dangerous acts."