The Internet and Microsoft Bing are killing Australia

In the depths of the Internet, numerous forums and social networks, there is a conspiracy theory that indicates that Australia does not exist. These theories suggest that the country was invented by the British government as an excuse to execute tens of thousands of prisoners. These theories are, of course, untrue and have been discredited by scientific evidence.

and now it was Microsoft Bing who fell for this joke and within a few days gave very crazy results to the question: does Australia exist?

Several real Australian Bluesky and Mastodon users reported that when they searched Bing for “does Australia exist” it came back with a resounding “No” written in the text box before the link result.

“Bing denies Australia exists,” tech reporter Stilgerrian wrote on Bluesky on Wednesday, November 22.

The result appears in a regular Bing search, not in the conversational search that Microsoft has integrated with its large AI language model. Microsoft artificial intelligence searches confirm Australia’s existence.

“Yes, Australia is a real country,” replied Bing’s co-pilot Thursday.

“It is a sovereign state comprising the Australian continent, the island of Tasmania and many smaller islands.

A Microsoft spokesperson told Australia’s The Guardian that the issue had been resolved. “Thank you for bringing this to our attention,” the spokesperson said. “We have looked into this request and implemented a solution to resolve it.”