The Boring Future of Generative AI | WIRED – WIRED

This week, at its annual I/O developer conference in Mountain View, Google showcased ahead-spinning number of projects and products powered by or enhanced by AI. They included a new-and-improved version of itschatbot Bard, tools to help you write emails and documents or manipulate images,devices with AI baked in, and achatbot-like experimental version of Google search. For a full recap of the event, complete with insightful and witty commentary from my WIRED colleagues, check outour Google I/O liveblog.

Googles big pivot is, of course, largely fueled not by algorithms but by generative AI FOMO.

The appearance last November of ChatGPTthe remarkably clever butstill rather flawed chatbot fromOpenAIcombined with Microsoftadding the technology to its search engine Bing a few months later, triggered something of a panic at Google. ChatGPT proved wildly popular with users, demonstrating new ways to serve up information that threatened Googles vice grip on the search business and its reputation as the leader in AI.

The capabilities of ChatGPT and AI language algorithms like those powering itare so striking that some experts, including Geoffrey Hinton, a pioneering researcher who recently left Google, have felt compelled to warn that we might be building systems thatwe will someday struggle to control. OpenAIs chatbot is often astonishingly good at generating coherent text on a given subject, summarizing information from the web, and even answering extremely tricky questions that require expert knowledge.

And yet, unfettered AI language models are also silver-tongued agents of chaos. They will gladly fabricate facts, express unpleasant biases, andsay unpleasant or disturbing things with the right prompting. Microsoft was forced to limit the capabilities of Bing chat shortly after launch to avoid such embarrassing misbehavior, in part because its bot divulged its secret codenameSydneyandaccused aNew York Times columnist of not loving his spouse.

Google worked hard to tone down the chaotic streak of text-generation technology as it prepared theexperimental search feature announced yesterday that responds to search queries with chat-style answers synthesizing information from across the web.

Googles smarter version of search is impressively narrow-minded, refusing to use the first person or talk about its thoughts or feelings. It completely avoids topics that might be considered risky, refusing to dispense medical advice or offer answers on potentially controversial topics such as US politics.

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The Boring Future of Generative AI | WIRED - WIRED