Although generative AI chatbots can deliver answers to questions in a way that feels similar to Google, it's important to understand that these tools operate very differently from the search engines and retrieval systems that we're used to.
Google
Google helps users find and retrieve text or other information that already exists and has been published on the Internet. It does this by:
- identifying words and phrases in your search,
- looking for existing sources that match these terms, and
- applying a ranking algorithm to identify the results that are likely to be most relevant.
Chatbots
Where does the information come from?
- The free version of ChatGPT does not have real-time access to the Internet, and it is not searching an existing body of text for matches. Rather than pointing users to information that is already published on the Internet, it creates new text in response to a query in a conversational tone, based on the information that it was trained on. AI tools such as ChatGPT and Google Bard are trained on large repositories of data that are analyzed and develop patterns that generate responses to a question or prompt.
- When the chatbot provides an answer to a question, it will not immediately provide a reference for where the information came from. This is because it is pulling predictive language from a wide variety of places, so the information usually doesn't come from a single source. Because of this, you typically cannot trace the response back to a single parent source or know where the information came from.
- Bing Chat and Google Bard AI chatbots have real-time access to the Internet and use AI to transform a question into a set of queries used to search the Internet, and then generate a text-based response based on the information that it finds. Bing Chat and Google Bard will return Internet search results along with the chat response, and in some cases will provide links to the sources used to create the chat response.
How current is the information?
