Closing Out the Search Bar

^{(MARCH 01, 2023; Slate | Technology )}

Photo illustration by Slate.

As a child of the ’80s, I can divide my life cleanly into Before Google and After Google. Right around the turn of the millennium, the internet stopped being a tangled thicket of incomplete lists of weird stuff and became a useful research database.
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More than 90 percent of internet users around the world use Google to shop, navigate, and satisfy their curiosity about pretty much everything. The ads Google sells against this activity (and on other websites) have fueled a money-printing machine that generated more than a quarter-trillion dollars in sales last year.
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The click-based economy has made the world more efficient in some ways, but it turned this miraculous global information databank into a frenzied real estate auction with every website scrabbling to climb to the top of the search results, collect the most clicks, and retain the most eyeballs. Every webpage you load is a little slower thanks to the back-end auctions to determine which ads you’ll see.
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What would it mean to replace the click economy and its cornerstone, the search bar, with something like a conversation? This is what Bard and a ChatGPT-powered Bing are offering: the chance to ask more human questions (Where’s the best place to get a Christmas-style burrito around here, and what drones would you recommend to carry it aloft?) and have sustained conversations with a system that retains context. (Though notably, in an attempt to rein in some of its chatbot’s zanier behavior, Microsoft recently limited users to five questions per session.) Instead of offering you a menu of links (and ads), your interlocutor/informational concierge cuts to the chase, perhaps offering some footnotes for further reading. It will even offer up its answers in a pirate-y voice or rhyming couplets if you ask.
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No human, not even the engineers who built them, can glean much insight into how [large language model] associations work across thousands or millions of variables, or, more importantly, why they make particular associations. And that makes it much harder to correct mistakes or prevent harm without relying on kludgy filters and censorship.

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