City News Bureau of Chicago, a now-defunct news outfit once legendary as a training ground for tough-as-nails, shoe-leather reporters, famously had as its unofficial motto: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” Thanks to the advent of ChatGPT, the new Bing Search, Bard, and a host of copycat search chatbots based on large language models, we are all going to have to start living by City News’ old shibboleth.
Researchers already knew that large language models were imperfect engines for search queries, or any fact-based request really, because of their tendency to make stuff up (a phenomenon A.I. researchers call “hallucination”). But the world’s largest technology companies have decided that the appeal of dialogue as a user interface—and the ability of these large language models to perform a vast array of natural language-based tasks, from translation to summarization, along with the potential to couple these models with access to other software tools that will enable them to perform tasks (whether it is running a search or booking you theater tickets)—trumps the potential downsides of inaccuracy and misinformation.
