Bing Chat argues and lies when it gets code wrong

To try Bing Chat, you must get on a waiting list, and then you are forced to use Edge. On a positive note, the experience is better than ChatGPT's version. Bing Chat is snappier, shows what is searched in the backend, and gives suggestions on continuing the conversation and the occasional references supporting its code and claims. Or so I thought.

I asked it to code a class to query Athena with Python. It looked good at first, but things went bad when I asked it to stream results into a feather file. In particular, it used an 'append' flag with the 'pyarrow.feather.write_feather' method, which is not in the documentation and the references it produced. One reference it produced used 'fastparquet.write()', which has an append flag. It may have confused the two.

When I gave Bing Chat a chance to correct itself, I was surprised when it wrote, "I am not wrong.", and continued with source code to prove its point only to prove itself wrong unknowingly. To top it off, when I asked to show me where it got the code from, it directed me correctly to the 'pyarrow/feather.py' source on Github. But there, I found that the source code differs completely from the one it showed me.

In summary, Bing Chat generated code for me. And:

1. It imagined a non-existing flag and feature in an open-source library. 

2. It refused to back down and argued it was right when given a chance to correct itself.

3. Its proof (source code) for being right showed it was wrong.

4. Worse, the proof was made up, and the referenced source is entirely different.

That is devastating. It produced incorrect code, failed to understand its mistake and faked source code with references. It did everything it could to throw me off and get things wrong.

Christian Prokopp, Founder BoldData.org