Happy Halloween. This launched literally 13 minutes ago as of me typing this, but ChatGPT is now a search engine called ChatGPT Search. If you pay for ChatGPT or signed up for the original waitlist of ChatGPT search, you should have access to new features in ChatGPT right now. Now, ChatGPT is a search engine, I guess.
The biggest complaint most people had about AI was the training cutoff. So to combat this, AI creators started allowing their AI models to search the web. Tools such as Perplexity and Bing AI Sydney Chat Mode could search the web and return information with their AI models. Google does this automatically under a large amount of searches, and everyone hates it.
Allowing an AI to actually visit the current internet is a cool idea in theory, but in reality is the same as those search highlights in Google search. The only thing that the robots could do is you could ask them dumb questions, like analyzing your Twitter account and your friend's Twitter account to see who is funnier. When Google AI overview was in beta, it told me that I'm "not funny but my jokes are well executed", so that's something. I don't think AI can do this anymore.
For quite some time, ChatGPT could search the internet if you paid for Plus, or even search in limited amounts for free users. Some people thought this was a good thing, and some people thought it was bad. The biggest complaint was that people thought other people would be discouraged from visiting the actual websites where the information is from. This is a valid concern. People are searching using AI because they don't want to visit webpages, what would make them change their mind?
Now, however, the search feature is an active competitor to traditional search engines. When you open ChatGPT, there is now a globe icon. Clicking that will enable the new search mode, which has an interface that you probably recognize the pattern of:
The biggest difference between the already existing search functionality and this new search is how search works. After you make a search, multiple pages will be read, and you will be given an answer like before. Sources are cited like on Wikipedia, but instead using the web address rather than a [1]. However, the bot can also include media in it's results, like images and videos:
ChatGPT can now embed things such as maps, stocks, weather, sports, and news articles as well. These are all things that you definitely need a Large Language Model for.
My biggest concern is that I know there will be people who will be using this completely over Google. And I cannot help but think of all the energy that will be consumed. For some searches like the weather or sports game scores, I don't even know why you would use AI in the first place. I feel like it would be faster to Google it regularly. Google's weather app on newer Pixel phones has an AI Weather Summary, which already baffles me because the weather app is the summary. And if for some reason you wanted a weather summary anyways, we had a tool for that called a METAR.
Not only that, but I feel like the article economy will start to die down a little. Granted, search results aren't that good currently and are mostly filled with SEO spam. However, I cannot help but feel like so many pages are going to get less exposure, such as news articles and small blog posts about niche subjects.
Another issue is I feel this is going to make people a little dumber. Instead of learning how to navigate pages and read longer articles, people are just going to get used to wanting the information now. Plus, it's harder to fall down rabbit holes as the AI doesn't suggest related topics. You have to know what information you want first, and everything is already personalized to you. The fun aspect of discovery is gone.
There are a lot more concerns about using AI for searches, such as bias, however a lot of people have already touched on these subjects, so I don't want to get into them. Have a happy Halloween, and I hope this isn't the most scary thing you see.