As stated here, CHAT BOTS like CHAT GPT (funded by Microsoft), BARD (created by Google) want to change the way billions of people search for information, friends and products. Somewhere a few technological brains have decided for the rest of us are missing out on the awesome information they have been collected for decades.
But do we want to converse with a search engine? It is one thing when we talk to Alexa or any of the other devices we can talk to, but does it make us smarter? Or more dependent on them?
There are multiple law suits against Google across the globe for not only dominating but more importantly – censoring the content they collect from 1.9 Billion websites in the world (source). You and I are the ones that make search engines profitable by creating the data they leverage to give back to us.
All types of businesses and influencers are dependent on people searching for and finding their information, products and services. In exchange, search engines are allowed to sell our information to advertising and data collection companies. But these content creators turn around and spend billions ($51 billion in 2022 as stated here) to craft effective SEO practices to make their content visible on the search engines who take our information.
There are other costs as well. Various types of search bots consume about 64% of all traffic on the internet. Think about the challenges this places on our economy – and our health.
- These facilities also consume electricity at an astonishing rate, with data centers accounting for 2% of the US’ annual power consumption. Meanwhile, data centers in China use as much electricity as Hungary and Greece combined.
- There are nearly 3 million data centers in the US alone, and a 2014 report from the US Department of Energy found that together, these data centers consume 165 billion gallons of water annually. To put this in context, the World Health Organization estimates that adults need roughly 5 gallons of water a day to meet basic health and hygiene standards. This means that the annual water usage by data centers in the US could support over 90 million people’s basic water requirements for one year.
(source)
Not to belittle the impact of energy and water consumption, but they are only the beginning of the problem. To understand the biggest problem, and the one that will impact literally billions of people not only searching the internet but those providing the content.
CHAT BOTS are not smart. They do not create original thoughts. They simply re-purpose, or re-phase was humans already created. The concept of CHAT BOTS using Artificial Intelligence (AI) is not new and will be a process that is continuously improved.
To define the current state of CHAT GPT and other CHAT BOTS, let’s return to the response on the search for “great coffee”. Do you see a single reference to where CHAT GPT “learned” the answers to the question? Is there a single link to the source content?
Imagine you are searching, have just been diagnosed with a pretty bad, possibly fatal illness. Today you go to a search engine (probably Google) and look for the best doctors, the best clinics, the best medicines, the best way to help change your lifestyle, etc. Most likely this will become a daily search to find a cure or at least make your life more comfortable. The search engines will present multiple websites who the search engines define as “authorities” on the subject. You, the user, control who you will read.
In the world of CHAT GPT, the CHAT BOT decides who you will read.
The last 10-12 years we’ve all seen and read about fake news. At least today we have the option to click on multiple links from the search results. CHAT BOTS eliminate that option. The tech company decides what we get to read.
CHAT BOTS are the cumulative result of their trillions and trillions of searches. NOT ORIGNAL THOUGHT.
Maybe CHAT BOTS will evolve into providing reference for the source data. Maybe as CHAT BOTS mature, they will provide us the option to actually read the original thoughts that created the CHAT BOTS answers.
CHAT BOTS lie because they present their answers as the “authority” when they are not. They present themselves as smart, but all they (are currently) do is add a few nouns, adverbs and adjectives to compose a human paragraph.
By believing CHAT BOTS are smart, we are switching humanity from being teachers and leaders to becoming the robots led by other robots.
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