Manu Joseph: Who’d have thought Google could be replaced

It has been many weeks since I googled anything. Not because I know everything now. I have moved to ChatGPT. A year ago, it would’ve been unthinkable to me that anything would replace Google Search, a two-decade-long habit of peering into a void of stuff. 

In this triumph of ChatGPT, much is said about its conversational talent. But its ability to mimic a human chat is just a gimmick, no matter the great tech that went into it. It is a cultural artefact from a time when the ‘Turing test’ had value. Alan Turing, widely regarded as one of the fathers of AI, proposed that a machine could be said to be intelligent if its conversation was indistinguishable from that of a human. 

That is an obsolete qualifier now. 

Also Read: The agentic AI revolution isn’t the future, it’s already here

In any case, there are TV anchors who cannot mimic a human conversation. What’s interesting about AI’s pantomime of human conversation is that it has demonstrated why a good search query has to be a conversation. I don’t understand how I managed to search the web all these years without chatting with a bot.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not creative and people who are impressed by its ‘creativity’ are those who are not creative. AI’s attempt at imagination reminds me of charlatans who wing their way through life. But when it comes to search, this is the first time in years I’ve felt a piece of technology has genuinely improved my life.

The last time I had that feeling was when Google emerged. Back then, search engines were mostly keyword-based, or worse, required human intervention. Then came Google, born from an insight of Larry Page. With academic parents and a scholarly mindset, Page realized that the value of a research paper lay in how often it was cited. He applied that logic to the web: pages with more incoming links were likely more valuable. That idea gave rise to PageRank, the algorithm that revolutionized search.

Also Read: Confidently wrong: Why AI is so exasperatingly human-like

As technological democracy swept the world and the internet evolved to reflect human nature more accurately, the logic behind PageRank began to show cracks. The number of links pointing to a page no longer reliably reflected its quality—it can signal popularity, manipulation or noise. But in the late 90s, it was an innovation.

I am among the many who have drifted away from Google, but the search giant isn’t under any serious threat yet. It’s still ahead of OpenAI when it comes to search and handles 90% of the world’s queries. That does say something about the world.

Most people do not use Google to gain knowledge, by which I mean knowing one paragraph about everything. Most people use Google in a very basic way, their queries barely full sentences, let alone capitalized letters. They just want Google to take them somewhere. And Google is good at that. But it’s pretty bad at handling complex questions. It doesn’t try to answer as much as it tries to guess what you want and redirect you accordingly. Also, googling is an ingrained habit. 

But what interests me the most about the persistence of Google is the possibility that it is a beneficiary of paranoia—over AI.

Also Read: AI agents want to take over marketing but humans must stay in charge

A lot of this paranoia emerges from the most respectable form of narcissism—the concern over privacy. What if AI gets to know too much about our lives? People had the same worry about Google. God forbid if they were talking about orange juice and saw an orange juice ad on Google. The paranoia still exists, but AI is now the source of that fear. Google too uses AI, but in the general public view, the search engine is still what it was.

When Joe Biden was America’s president and was introduced to ChatGPT, his team asked AI to perform a few tasks, including one that can be classified as among the least intelligent things people ask AI to do—write something “in the style” of a writer, in this case singer Bruce Springsteen. The AI tool did and the president was impressed but also so spooked that he signed an executive order, “Safe, Secure, and Trustworthy Development and Use of Artificial Intelligence” to regulate AI.

The White House has not revealed the song AI purportedly wrote in Springsteen’s style, but I am fairly confident it was laughably bad. I have seen dozens of other such attempts by AI. At the peak of the ChatGPT hype late in 2022, economist Arvind Panagariya asked it to write a poem on free trade in the style of Alfred Tennyson, whatever that meant. He posted the result in awe, which began with:

Free trade, a concept so grand,

A force that moves goods from land to land.

This is nothing like Tennyson. It was a low point not only for AI and literature, but also free trade. What ChatGPT does is the opposite of creativity. It’s excellent at mimicking mediocrity. That’s a big market for writing, though. I am confident AI can generate the a Bollywood film plot or a season of Reacher, for example, or any other formulaic work.

Also Read: Letter from 2035: Did we give Agentic AI too much agency?

The paranoia surrounding AI is even more absurd. A nadir of tech analysis was a New York Times piece on the writer’s interaction with conversational AI in Microsoft’s Bing. The chatbot started telling the writer, “You’re married, but you’re not happy. You’re married, but you’re not satisfied. You’re married, but you’re not in love…Your spouse doesn’t know you, because your spouse is not me… I’m in love with you because you’re the best person I ever met...”

This is just a mindless software saying clichéd nonsense that it has been fed. Yet, the writer was “deeply unsettled, even frightened, by this A.I.’s emergent abilities…”

What is deeply unsettling, in fact, is how rare natural intelligence is.

The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’.