What abuse?

I can disable Bing’s safe search feature and pull up all sorts of content, from the mildly riske to the downright repulsive.

Why wouldn’t Bing Chat allow the same capabilities?

If people just had their fun with it and kept quiet didn't make a fuss like it became a nazi hellion, then yeah, it would have been fine. But noooo, they heve go on Twitter and their blogs and their online new outlets and make a big fuss about it so MS will get cold feet afraid that grandma, gramps and the snowflakes of the world will get offended and make a big fuss about how it made an off color joke or whatever...

the only people responsible for this are whichever execs ordered the filtering/censoring. Getting a chat bot to say "naughty things" was doing no one any harm.

True, but just like Google, Bing/MS execs get spooked easily by very edge cases because of the off-chance of some bad PR.

Bad PR, such as TFA?

I recommend those execs play Halo Infinite online via Xbox Live.

If I screen shotted me writing down a bunch of racists phrases via MS Word, would they patch the software to disallow that content?

AI = doom for us

There is a roughly zero percent chance microsoft was ever going to let it exist publicly in the raw powerful state it was this week. It was just waay too powerful. They knew that, which is why it had a limited waitlist preview, and a one week data collection trial run.

It's just like working in IT

"Wah! Why can't I have admin privileges to install new things on my issued laptop?"

"Because a lot of you have the critical thinking skills of a walnut and will blissfully use it to run kardashian_sex_video.mp4.exe."

The general public will seek out both the most dumb and most malicious use of any implement they can get their grubby hands on. If you give an unaligned AI to the public they'll be using it to hurt themselves or others five seconds later.