Chatbots could one day replace search engines. Here's why that's a terrible idea.

To support MIT Technology Review's journalism, please consider becoming a subscriber. But critics are starting to push back, arguing that the approach is wrong-headed. Asking computers a question and getting an answer in natural language can hide complexity behind a veneer of authority that is not deserved. "We got too bogged down by what we could do; we haven't looked at what we should do," says Chirag Shah at the University of Washington, who works on search technologies. On March 14, Shah and his University of Washington colleague Emily M. Bender, who studies computational linguistics and ethical issues in natural-language processing, published a paper that criticizes what they see as a rush to embrace language models for tasks they are not designed to address.