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Here’s the problem: the technology is simply not ready to be used like this at this scale. AI language models are notorious bullshitters, often presenting falsehoods as facts. They are excellent at predicting the next word in a sentence, but they have no knowledge of what the sentence actually means. That makes it incredibly dangerous to combine them with search, where it’s crucial to get the facts straight.
OpenAI, the creator of the hit AI chatbot ChatGPT, has always emphasized that it is still just a research project, and that it is constantly improving as it receives people’s feedback. That hasn’t stopped Microsoft from integrating it into a new version of Bing, albeit with caveats that the search results might not be reliable.
Google has been using natural-language processing for years to help people search the internet using whole sentences instead of keywords. However, until now the company has been reluctant to integrate its own AI chatbot technology into its signature search engine, says Chirag Shah, a professor at the University of Washington who specializes in online search. Google’s leadership has been worried about the “reputational risk” of rushing out a ChatGPT-like tool. The irony!
The recent blunders from Big Tech don’t mean that AI-powered search is a lost cause. One way Google and Microsoft have tried to make their AI-generated search summaries more accurate is by offering citations. Linking to sources allows users to better understand where the search engine is getting its information, says Margaret Mitchell, a researcher and ethicist at the AI startup Hugging Face, who used to lead Google’s AI ethics team.
This might even help give people a more diverse take on things, she says, by nudging them to consider more sources than they might have done otherwise.
But that does nothing to address the fundamental problem that these AI models make up information and confidently present falsehoods as fact. And when AI-generated text looks authoritative and cites sources, that could ironically make users even less likely to double-check the information they’re seeing.
“A lot of people don’t check citations. Having a citation gives something an air of correctness that might not actually be there,” Mitchell says.
But the accuracy of search results is not really the point for Big Tech, says Shah. Though Google invented the technology that is fueling the current AI hype, the acclaim and attention are fixed firmly on the buzzy startup OpenAI and its patron, Microsoft. “It is definitely embarrassing for Google. They’re in a defensive position now. They haven’t been in this position for a very long time,” says Shah.
Meanwhile, Microsoft has gambled that expectations around Bing are so low a few errors won’t really matter. Microsoft has less than 10% of the market share for online search. Winning just a couple more percentage points would be a huge win for them, Shah says.
There’s an even bigger game beyond AI-powered search, adds Shah. Search is just one of the areas where the two tech giants are battling each other. They also compete in cloud computing services, productivity software, and enterprise software. Conversational AI becomes a way to demonstrate cutting-edge tech that translates to these other areas of the business.
Shah reckons companies are going to spin early hiccups as learning opportunities. “Rather than taking a careful approach to this, they’re going in a very bold fashion. Let the [AI system] make mistakes, because now the cat is out of the bag,” he says.
Essentially, we—the users—are now doing the work of testing this technology for free. “We’re all guinea pigs at this point,” says Shah.
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