That was cool and gave me a glimpse into the sort of fast information-sifting that might be the future of chabot-enabled search. But had this changed online shopping for me? Not really. I already have a go-to website for production recommendations. (Wired.com, of course.) And I’m not sure I trust the wisdom of ChatGPT—pulled from sites I may not know, with a methodology I don’t understand—the way I do a product reviewer, especially one who is transparent about their methodology and thought process.
In fact, as I looked at the citations for this search—gearjunkie.com and cnn.com—the response started to bum me out. The Bing bot was drawing from the written work of humans who had spent time on these reviews. But it had obfuscated and, in some cases, straight-up plagiarized their sentences. A Microsoft executive told reporters this week, “We care a bunch about driving content back to content creators. That’s why we put annotations and citations. We make it easy for people to click through to get to those sites.” But the chatbot’s responses are designed to remove the need to visit those sites, and I’m not sure many people will click through. Hayley Sandberg, a spokesperson for Microsoft, says the company isn’t yet sharing data on click-through rates.
As I continued on my quest for the perfect headphones, the chatbot grew less impressive. When I asked which of the models it suggested was the most environmentally friendly, it came back with BS. Like a high schooler trying to fill a word count, it started with some waffling: “According to the search results, the environmental impact of headphones depends on several factors, such as the type, size, materials, and usage of the headphones.” It went on to say that wireless headphones have a higher carbon footprint than wired ones and prattled on about how other features, such as sound quality or water resistance, might affect how a user feels about headphones too. And it concluded with the AI equivalent to the finale of a five-paragraph essay due in five minutes: “The choice of headphones depends on your personal needs and preferences, as well as the trade-offs you are willing to make between environmental and other factors.” I still don’t have running headphones.
Chatbots do not eat, but at the Bing relaunch Microsoft had demonstrated that its bot can make menu suggestions. I asked Bing’s chatbot to plan out my meals for the week—vegetarian and low-carb, please. In a matter of seconds, I had a pretty delicious-sounding schedule ahead of me: chia pudding with coconut milk and nuts; tandoori grilled tofu with red peppers and broccolini; ricotta-stuffed portobello mushrooms with arugula salad.
I asked Bing to generate me a grocery list based on that meal plan. Surely, it said, and delivered. Finally, I asked it to organize that list by grocery department. After giving me very basic tips about how one might go about doing that (“Make your grocery shopping list on paper or on your phone before going to the grocery store. Otherwise, you will end up with many unnecessary products you might not need”), the bot pulled it off. Pretty nifty.
