Microsoft is already loosening restrictions it recently placed on interactions with the Bing AI chatbot and said it’s going to start testing another option that lets users choose the tone of the chat, with options for precise (shorter, more focused answers), creative (longer and more chatty), or balanced for a bit of both.

After repeated reports of strange behaviour — like the time it split into multiple personalities and one of them offered us furry porn — and jailbreaks that did things like expose its secret rules, Microsoft set new rules last Friday that limited the number of interactions testers could have and how long they last. The limits cut down testers to five turns per session and a max of 50 per day.

According to Microsoft, longer chat sessions can make Bing “become repetitive or be prompted/provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or in line with our designed tone”. Now it’s turned that back up to six chat turns per session with a max of 60 chats per day for any testers who have access, and the post on its blog says the plan is to increase the daily cap to 100 sessions soon and allow searches that don’t count against the chat total.

Microsoft has said it didn’t “fully envision” people using the Bing AI bot as social entertainment, but with even experienced tech reporters failing this version of the mirror test, it introduced new guard rails.

Ars Technica reported that commenters on Reddit complained about last week’s limit, saying Microsoft “lobotomised her”, “neutered” the AI, and that it was “a shell of its former self”. These are the people the Bing team is responding to in its post:

“These long and intricate chat sessions are not something we would typically find with internal testing. In fact, the very reason we are testing the new Bing in the open with a limited set of preview testers is precisely to find these atypical use cases from which we can learn and improve the product.

“Since placing the chat limits, we have received feedback from many of you wanting a return of longer chats, so that you can both search more effectively and interact with the chat feature better.”