AI Search Is a Disaster

Last week, both Microsoft and Google announced that they would incorporate AI programs similar to ChatGPT into their search engines--bids to transform how we find information online into a conversation with an omniscient chatbot. One problem: These language models are notorious mythomaniacs. In a promotional video, Google's Bard chatbot made a glaring error about astronomy--misstating by well over a decade when the first photo of a planet outside our solar system was captured--that caused its parent company's stock to slide as much as 9 percent. The live demo of the new Bing, which incorporates a more advanced version of ChatGPT, was riddled with embarrassing inaccuracies too. Even as the past few months would have many believe that artificial intelligence is finally living up to its name, fundamental limits to this technology suggest that this month's announcements might actually lie somewhere between the Google Glass meltdown and an iPhone update--at worst science-fictional hype, at best an incremental improvement accompanied by a maelstrom of bugs. The trouble arises when we treat chatbots not just as search bots, but as having something like a brain--when companies and users trust programs like ChatGPT to analyze their finances, plan travel and meals, or provide even basic information.