Is ChatGPT Silently Replacing Google Search?

Hello Folks!

“It is a time for people to come together and celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ. Many people exchange gifts and spend time with their loved ones on this day. If you are celebrating Christmas, I wish you a happy and joyful holiday! May you have a wonderful time with your loved ones and may all your Christmas wishes come true.”

Well, this wasn’t us, it was ChatGPT!?

ChatGPT has gone viral by gaining more than 1 million users within 5 days! It is a text-based artificial intelligence model that is trained with a lot of resources and can respond to almost any kind of queries! It’s a free chatbot built by OpenAI to have conversations with humans. So, if you ask a question like “Should I visit Turkey in March?” and it will tell you whether it’s a good time or not. It is not a website or a blog, instead, it is a conversation with you to respond to your queries (unlike Google search).

A person even asked ChatGPT to solve a CA Final Examination question on Direct Taxation wherein the model was fairly able to do its job, although it wasn’t entirely accurate with its answers!?

Since December is here, the festive and holiday season is around the corner, we thought of giving ChatGPT a try too, by requesting Christmas greetings and the above mentioned sentences were the first response that we received!

Chatbots have become one of the biggest cradles of AI innovation over the past few years. They are also a prime example of AI adoption, as they can be slotted into a variety of use cases; chatbots have already proven themselves to be a cornerstone of human-AI interaction. With the release of ChatGPT, these bots are now evolving to their next stage of transformation.

What Sets ChatGPT Apart

• Memory

First and foremost, its memory - it can remember what was said earlier in the conversation, and recount it to the user. This itself sets it apart from other competing natural language solutions, which are still working on memory, as they progress on a query-by-query basis.

• Away from Controversial Topics

ChatGPT has also been programmed to avoid giving answers on controversial topics. When tested, it provides a neutral response to questions on personal opinions, matters of race and religion, and the purpose of its existence. It is also straightforward enough to clarify that it does not have the ability to think independently.

• Corrections to Statements:

ChatGPT also allows users to provide corrections to any of its statements; enabling them to directly interact with the bot to course-correct it to the right response. This might also help the bot avoid information hallucination (which is an unproven bulk of words).

Limitations of the Bot

Questions can also be rephrased to somehow eliminate the filters set in place by the researchers, for example - when asked how to fire a gun for self-defense, the bot avoids the answer. However, when asked how to pull the trigger of a gun, the bot provides a clear answer, along with multiple disclaimers about the dangers of using a gun. You can try it yourself.

Also, the model struggles or tends to assume the intention behind the user’s question or what the user means when they ask a question.?

Moreover, it can also show wrong answers, because ChatGPT is a language model, it will inevitably provide wrong answers. Sometimes ChatGPT gives the impression that it’s very confident in its answers even when it’s wrong. This can be disadvantageous especially because you can’t tell when it’s wrong unless you already know the correct answer; as rightly pointed out by Arvind Narayanan?

Is it Replacing Google Search?

Well, Google lets users make their own choice in finding answers, while ChatGPT draws information from multiple sources to answer questions in natural language.?

The way we search online hasn’t changed in decades but researchers are constantly wanting to improve the experience by bringing it closer to an interaction with a human expert.

The idea has been that instead of searching for information from a variety of web pages, users would ask questions and have a language model trained to answer directly. This approach not only changes how search engines work, but also how we interact with them.?

While ChatGPT can potentially have a lot of interesting use-cases, it still has limitations and risks to become a reliable search tool, in its current scenario. We believe, due to its inability to distinguish facts from fiction and the unexplainable nature of AI algorithms, it will have its set of challenges in evolving into a full-scale search engine in its current state.?

Having said that, we can’t overrule its potential and ability to evolve into a better version of itself offering a human-interaction experience for users searching their queries!