You have your website neatly optimized for search engines, the advertisers are satisfied, the original content is flowing – and yet you have to worry more than ever. Because chatbots with artificial intelligence have hung a sword of Damocles over the heads of all website operators who provide information. Their universal claim gives a glimpse of a future in which a search engine no longer lists the pages to which it refers, but rather embodies them. Those who search would then hardly have to visit the pages – and the visits would collapse.
Kornelius Kindermann is a trainee at iX and is interested in networks, system management and the backlash of technology on society.
In itself this is not a new development. You don’t need AI leaps in innovation to notice that Google has been happy to help searchers for a long time. The trend towards assisted searches can be seen in Wikipedia excerpts, shopping recommendations and summaries, which already dominate the first page of the search results. How convenient – and how lucrative for the provider – if Google simply had an answer for everything. You would hardly have to leave the search engine anymore.
Site operators ask themselves the question of meaning
A chatbot modeled on Microsoft’s Bing would be a real killer for the internet world. Because a statistical correlation model has difficulty citing sources, a smart search engine would be reluctant to bother with pointing to the original pages on which its neurons were trained. The site operators would have to line up behind the artists who complain about the theft of their intellectual property – and should ask themselves why they even bother to produce their own content.
The sword hanging over the site operators even has a name: Bard is the name of the AI chatbot offensive that Google has been running for a few months. The rope preventing Bard from swooping down is the inaccuracy chatbots still reveal today. Microsoft’s Bing bot confessed its love to users, ChatGPT’s vulnerabilities amuse with regularity, and Bard gave incorrect answers about the James Webb Space Telescope during the test – which caused Google’s shares to plummet by 9 percent.
(Image: iX)
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But while the rope gets thinner as the AIs behind the chatbots get trained, it could just as easily be cut. All that is needed for this is a disclaimer and a supposed reference: “Here is your answer – but don’t take me for a word, there is more about it on this page!” That would be enough to intercept a massive chunk of daily searches and keep them on Bard despite the disclaimer. And once a new generation of searchers has gotten used to the bot, the eradication begins – from small blogs to specialized forums to large magazines.
This comment is the editorial of the upcoming iX 5/2023, which will be published on April 27th.
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