Let’s have the entire class say it in unison, shall we? ‘What Could Possibly Go Wrong?’ In an effort to keep up with increasing competition, Google announced yesterday that it would be adding Artificial Intelligence to the inner workings of its search engine. It will be based on the same large language model that drives ChatGPT and Google’s own chatbot called Bard. The CEO of Google’s parent company Alphabet described this latest development as “an exciting inflection point.” It’s probably an inflection point to be sure, but there are many forms of excitement, not all of them healthy or productive. Let’s just say that we should all have questions. (AP)

Google on Wednesday disclosed plans to infuse its dominant search engine with more advanced artificial-intelligence technology, a drive that’s in response to one of the biggest threats to its long-established position as the internet’s main gateway.

The gradual shift in how Google’s search engine runs is rolling out three months after Microsoft’s Bing search engine started to tap into technology similar to that which powers the artificially intelligent chatbot ChatGPT, which has created one of Silicon Valley’s biggest buzzes since Apple released the first iPhone 16 years ago.

My first question would be why they feel the need to do this. What improvement will be seen by the users as a result of weaving Bard into Google’s innards? Will search results be delivered more quickly? Google is already insanely fast. Even if they speed it up, I would wager that none of us would notice.

Will Bard make Google’s search returns more accurate? I suppose it’s possible, but keep in mind the fact that when they rolled out Bard for its first public demo, it got the first question it was asked wrong. And it was wrong by a wide margin. Just like ChatGPT, Bard seems completely incapable of saying “I don’t know.” It instead finds the closest match available and “confidently states it as factual.”

Bard also acts “just plain weird” sometimes. It started making rather graphic sexual comments to one of the early beta testers. That weirdness is another trait that Bard shares with ChatGPT. You may recall how my wife and I seemed to very nearly break ChatGPT recently and led it to give both incorrect responses and strange commentary while conducting an experiment where we asked it to generate lottery numbers. (Just for the record, we played the bot’s numbers in last night’s New York Lotto and it got one right out of six. So I’m still not writing this post from the Carribean.)

I’m sure I’m probably missing something here, but I honestly don’t see how this type of AI will do anything to substantively improve the performance of the major search engines. And I can see several areas where it might actually degrade their performance. But we’re apparently at the stage where everything has to involve AI all of the time and anyone not doing it feels like they must be missing out on something. Cue the Terminator robots in three, two…