BingAI makes up an answer because it sounds more interesting than the truth

Why are people surprised by this? Did they really expect "intellect"?

There is always an element of probability in any answer you receive from AI. Under the best of circumstances, it's really just kind of a best guess suggestion based on the available data. No guarantees of any kind.

If you can't live with this, if need any sort of unerring logic or truth, you should probably look elsewhere.

Nobody is surprised by this. The only difference is that nobody expected more from Bing so they had everything to gain and nothing to lose. At least they're known for something more than porn now, right? This is second mover advantage right here.

Curious to learn how any machine can determine what something "sounds" like, notwithstanding the ability to make judgements on those sounds.

This is all part of the "language model" it has been trained on.

Someone forgot to train it on a "truth model". It seems to rank language structure above veracity.