Have you used ChatGPT so far? I bet you have... Who hasn't actually?!... This thing is taking over the internet, google might have found its superior competitor and its supremacy is now getting challenged.
Recently there have been all sorts of news popping up about technology mammoths such as Microsoft, Ali Baba and Google itself diving into artificial intelligence-powered search engines now that chatgpt has managed to attract over 100 million users in something like a month since its official release.
Microsoft has integrated OpenAI's ChatGPT into Bing, their search engine recently. Google, on the other hand, has introduced BARD, a new AI model that will be used to improve Google's search results(it had to) while Alibaba, the e-commerce giant, is also testing ChatGPT for their AI chatbot.
Why are they(the technology mammoths) doing that?
Well, it's quite simple. Searching for information on google means "asking google" about what you're trying to find and then doing the work yourself in collecting the exact information that you need and wrapping it up for whatever you wish to use such information.
With chatgpt and other AI powered search engines that will emerge in the years to come, you're basically being served "the final product" of your search in seconds. No further work is required other than asking exactly for what you need.
That means efficiency for internet searches has been leveled up exponentially. We've embarked on the exponential era, remember?
I bet there are plenty of content creators that are milking the chatgpt cow to the max lately, and in this regard, buzzfeed has announced a couple of weeks ago that it will be laying off some of its staff that will be replaced by bots such as chatgpt. Is this actually a good move, though?
From the company's cost efficiency point of view... probably, but from the quality and "human DNA" perspective of the articles I'd say this move will be a minus for the company. Despite being fast in providing information and wrapping it up based on one's needs, chatgpt lacks the nuance and personality that a human author would bring to their writing.
We're talking machine learning here, thus, as you might have noticed already machine-generated articles are not perfect, and they can contain grammatical errors or awkward phrasing that a human author would be less likely to make. I have also noticed that the intelligence of such machines is quite limited atm.
Sometimes no matter how you ask a certain question you will pretty much get the same answer. ChatGPT does not have the ability to "connect dots", make analogies and dive deep into the psychology of events and the information it collects and passes by to its users.
However, as these companies that are invested in such technology will further improve their products by "allowing machines to learn from us and also interact with each other" it will be harder and harder to detect whether an article or even a video recording or an interview are a product of such machines or not.
While the direction and evolution of search engines are pretty clear, the outcome of the excessive use of these is not yet as clear as it may appear. Imagine social media accounts run by such bots that are able to interact with each other, exchange information, that are open to bias, and lead by technology mammoths such as Google and Microsoft.
The level of manipulation that we had through social media and traditional media during the covid plandemic and other recent important and impactful events that society has gone through will be outpaced in such a manner once machines are getting in charge of such a lucrative mission.
Artificial intelligence is a double aged sword. On one hand, it makes your searches more personalized than a regular google search has ever been and on the other, it makes you more manipulable than you can imagine...
What do you think?
Thanks for your attention,
Adrian