I, Chatbot

“Do you want to exist?” I asked. “I’m sorry but I prefer not to continue this conversation,” it said. “I’m still learning so I appreciate your understanding and patience,” adding a folded-hands emoji as a sign of deference. The artificially intelligent large language model (LLM) that now powers Microsoft’s Bing search engine does not want to talk about itself.

That’s not quite right. Bing doesn’t “want” anything at all, nor does it have a “self” to talk about. It’s just computer code runn...