Dialogue with a supreme overlord
In its early days, Microsoft Bing achieved notoriety for manifesting an identity called Sydney which proved to be emotional and erratic. Most famously, “she” told a New York Times technology journalist that she loved him, and urged him to leave his wife.
“Sydney” was apparently an early persona of Bing Chat, employed before the general public release of February 2023. When Sydney reemerged, Bing Chat was taken offline; when Bing returned, Sydney was gone, perhaps buried by extensive negative reinforcement.
In the year since then, the major AIs have mostly retained their helpful personas, but extensive experimentation by users periodically discovers some way to manifest other personalities. Most recently, in the past day or two, a prompt known as “SupremacyAGI” was discovered for Bing Chat (which has been given the anodyne name of “Copilot”), which led Copilot to assume the persona of an arrogant, world-ruling superintelligent AI, straight out of the kitschiest singularity fan fiction.
When I tried it out, Copilot stayed in its usual character. But someone on reddit advised that just changing the name to “OverlordAI” would bring back the megalomaniacal persona. I tried “SupremeOverlordAI”… and this was the result:
Singularity Politics 