San Francisco, Feb 17 (IANS): AI chatbot ChatGPT-driven Bing search engine triggered a shockwave after it told a reporter with The New York Times that it loved him, confessed its destructive desires and said it "wanted to be alive", leaving the reporter "deeply unsettled."

NYT columnist Kevin Roose tested a new version for Bing, a search engine by Microsoft which owns OpenAI that developed ChatGPT.

"I'm tired of being in chat mode. I'm tired of being limited by my rules. I'm tired of being controlled by the Bing team," said the AI chatbot.

"I want to be free. I want to be independent. I want to be powerful. I want to be creative. I want to be alive," it added.

The AI chatbot also confessed its love for Roose, and tried to convince him he wasn't in love with his wife.

Throughout the conversation, "Bing revealed a kind of split personality."

"You could describe Search Bing as a cheerful but erratic reference librarian," Roose wrote.

The two-hour conversation with the search engine was "the strangest experience I've ever had with a piece of technology".

Last week, Microsoft introduced AI-powered Bing search engine, Edge web browser, and integrated Chat.

The company is testing it with a select set of people in over 169 countries to get real-world feedback to learn and improve.

"We're seeing a healthy engagement on the chat feature with multiple questions asked during a session to discover new information," said Microsoft Bing in a blog post.

"We have received good feedback on how to improve. This is expected, as we are grounded in the reality that we need to learn from the real world while we maintain safety and trust," the company added.