Search engines are among the most popular websites on the Internet, acting as a gateway to information for users. Whether you need to remember your online banking URL or the answer to a particularly difficult pub quiz question, Google is the first port of call for many.
Traditionally, search engines don’t necessarily answer the question directly, but instead filter the results they find online and present them as a list of links to sites they think might be useful for your search. In recent years, Google has introduced features like “featured snippets” and “knowledge panels” that try to bring information straight to you, rather than going somewhere else.
But that is changing with the advent of AI-powered chatbots and the technology that powers them.
Artificial intelligence or AI is already being used in search engines to rank relevant links or extract key phrases from text to populate knowledge windows. But the release of ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot that opened to the public in late November, prompted search engines to rethink the way they gather information and present it to users.
The future of search isn’t about jumping into a robotic search designed to half-find the search engine so it understands what you’re looking for. Instead, it’s about engaging in natural conversation and coming back to what you want.
The rise of ChatGPT has turned everything on its head: its revolutionary technology forced Microsoft to invest $10 billion in the company that developed it, OpenAI, while Google, the established search giant, asked each employee, two of whom spent up to four hours testing Bard , its version of a chat-based search engine.
Both tech giants clearly believe that AI-assisted search through a chat interface is likely the future of how we find information. However, there are problems with the predicted new function that are already arising.
“The new features will change the way we interact with search — like a chatbot, not just entering queries,” said Alexandra Urman, a researcher at the University of Zurich who studies how we use the information we find in search engines in Switzerland. . But they “also have much more potential to make things up and give false information,” she adds.
The AI chatbots behind search engines matter. When Google showed Bard, its answer to Microsoft Bing based on ChatGPT, the search engine confused a simple fact about the James Webb Space Telescope. Google later said that the error highlighted the importance of thoroughly testing such tools. Microsoft wasn’t immune either: its AI made up work hours and fictitious numbers when asked to summarize the company’s financial statement. Microsoft also stated that it “expected there would be bugs in the system” of its technology during this preview period.
Inventing things is a well-known problem in artificial intelligence, as it is prone to “hallucinations,” but it is risky when presented in the context of a search that for more than 20 years has been presented as an attempt to find out the truth.
Search engines have not always been successful in the past. “Google snippets weren’t always perfect, and sometimes they sum it up completely wrong,” Urman says, “so those issues were before ChatGPT and stuff like that. Now they are likely to be blamed.
Aside from fabricating information that should be taken as hard fact, AI-powered chat-based search engines have another problem: they are as stubborn as a child. “Sydney”, a ChatGPT-based Bing character, often calls users liars or trolls. (That’s what it did to meafter accessing the instrument and presenting it with a question about why it answered the question differently between sessions.)
There are also fears that, although the information will not be fabricated, the results will be poor. One of the reasons Bing can be so fast may be how it was trained. Chat-based search engines learn from large language models: in essence, they suck up huge amounts of text from the Internet and try to understand how we speak and what we know as a society. But as anyone who has been online knows, Internet discourse often degenerates into insults and people often hold outrageous views. The risk is that AI-powered search engines perpetuate our worst weaknesses.
However, this week I’m trying to use Bing instead of my regular Google search engine since I have access to it. I say “try to use” not “replace” because there are some things I don’t think I can use. And for questions that I get a direct answer from Bing, I always check Google.
The search for AI hasn’t gone away – the moment of the big bang – but we still have to be careful.
Source: I News
With a background in journalism and a passion for technology, I am an experienced writer and editor. As an author at 24 News Reporter, I specialize in writing about the latest news and developments within the tech industry. My work has been featured on various publications including Wired Magazine and Engadget.