Petulant AI-powered chatbots risk the integrity of search engines

Search engines are some of the most popular sites on the internet, acting as a gateway to information for users. Whether you're looking to remember the URL for your online banking or the answer to a particularly tricky pub quiz question, the first port of call for many is Google. Traditionally, search engines haven't necessarily directly answered a question, instead filtering results it finds on the internet and presenting them in a list of links to websites it believes may be useful to your query. In recent years, Google has rolled out features including'featured snippets' and'knowledge panels' that try to give you the information directly, rather than going elsewhere. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is already used in search engines to rank relevant links or pull out key phrases of text to populate knowledge panels.