Microsoft’s new share button makes it easy to show people what Bing AI is saying

Microsoft is trying to make it easier to share your experiences with its GPT-4-powered Bing Chat by adding a button that lets you post the AI’s response to Facebook, Twitter, or Pinterest. People are already sharing interesting (and sometimes annoying) things the chatbot says via screenshots, but it seems Microsoft is leaning towards it now. Maybe that’s a sign that it’s more confident all guardrails it is placed around the system after the users pushed it to the breaking point.

In a blog post on Friday, the company shows the share button, saying that you can use it to generate a recurring link to the answer in addition to sharing it on social media. Clicking the link will take you to a Bing Chat window, where it will populate the answer it gave to the person who shared it, complete with citations. You can also follow up on the other person’s answer. I followed a link to an answer about food ideasit asked for vegan versions of those foods, and it was given to me.

If you want to get the full experience, it looks like you’ll need to open the link in Edge and be signed in to a Microsoft account that has access to the Bing Chat preview. (The company still uses a waitlist system, but it appears that letting people know right away when they click the “join waitlist” button.) If you don’t have access to Bing Chat, Edge will still show you the shared answer, and in other browsers like Chrome or Safari, you’ll only see message telling you to download Edge.

In addition to the share button, Microsoft says it’s testing “an optimization in ‘Balanced’ mode that significantly improves performance” that allows the bot to respond to your questions faster. None of the three Verge testing staff noticed a big difference, but it didn’t seem to catch as well as it used to.

Microsoft also said it improved Bing’s “context understanding” over the past week, letting it “get a greater amount of context” when you use the Creative tone. That should let it summarize large amounts of text better than before, according to the blog post.