The ABC’s story about chatbot ‘AI’ technology coming to Google and Bing search engines joins a breathless choir about artificial intelligence, which isn’t intelligence at all.
On the face of it, the moves by Alphabet and Microsoft are entirely logical, since the algorithms involved are really only search functions with the capacity to plagiarize online content.
And ABC chatbot Tom Williams does at least mention the logical conclusion that the ‘new business model’ has less to do with helping people find things than developing new personal information appropriation value propositions. For example, as alluded to, if search engine users can be fooled into ‘chatting’ with chat engines, they may divulge considerably more about themselves than they get in return.
Of course, Alphabet and Microsoft are not about to disclose what personal information they are keen on, how they will package it, and to whom they will sell it. Let alone what information customers will do with this newly expanded personal information.
Williams also mentions the promoted capacity of chat bots to deliver answers directly instead of merely offering links to possible sources. That is to say–which he didn’t–that the search engines will offer someone else’s opinion, PR, or propaganda as an answer to be confused for truth, fact, or definitive canon knowledge. After all, no algorithm can devise its own answer. It must have access to data sources, and will most likely be directed in undisclosed ways towards favoured sources.
That reality makes the technology a potential threat to existing sources of authority, even if they are questionable in their own right. Will Microsoft ChatGPT become more trusted than Fox News? Will Google Bard be regarded as more reliable than CBS? Will information accessed outside the USA reflect any local realities at all?
And we all thought News Corp was diabolical.
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