'AI-powered' search is off to a problematic start. Can Google and Bing fix it?

The era of AI-generated conversational search is, apparently, here. On 16th December I published a piece about whether ChatGPT could pose a threat to Google, as many were already suggesting that it might, just two and a half weeks on from the chatbot's release. At the time of writing, neither Google nor Microsoft – a major backer of ChatGPT's parent organisation, OpenAI – had indicated any plans to actually integrate technology like ChatGPT into their search engines, and the idea seemed like a far-off possibility. While ChatGPT is an impressive conversational chatbot, it has some significant drawbacks, particularly as an arbiter of facts and information: large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT have a tendency to "hallucinate" (the technical term) and confidently state wrong information, a task that ChatGPT's makers have called "challenging" to fix. But the idea of a chat-based search interface has its appeal.