We took a little time to get our hands on the many innovations that have, let’s say, revolutionized some (almost) all Microsoft products. The Redmond house is the most active and wild in riding the ChatGpt phenomenon. So let’s start with them. The Bing search engine is currently the most reassuring gateway to generative artificial intelligence. Since they opened it to the public, it’s a good way to immediately understand what we’re talking about.
What has changed in Bing?
Let’s start with Bing which, in the wake of the media success of ChatGpt and generative AI in general, has incredibly gained positions in the search engine market, dominated by an old AI giant like Google. In the last two months, Bing has been updated, changed its interface and offers features enhanced with OpenAi. By clicking Chat at the top left you have access to the chatbot. the first thing is to choose the style of conversation : «More creative», «More balanced» or «More precise».
A premise: even if you choose “more precise”, it is not said that it will provide correct answers. On the contrary: as the same engineers who instructed the Generative Pre-trained Transformer of OpenAI warn, the chatbot is prey to hallucinations (it says things that are not true, ed) but it is improving. And indeed in the course of these months she has begun to learn what he can and cannot say. For example: it no longer tells the user which stocks it is advisable to invest in, it does not tell fairy tales about Nazism and it does not reveal how to design a bomb at home.
How do you approach the Chatbot?
One suggestion is not to play “find the error” with Bing: don’t ask direct questions, don’t ask to solve math problems and forget the approach you have with traditional search engines where you enter a few words and choose between links . It’s not his. Instead, focus on chatter and dialogue. The point of these tools is precisely to start a conversation with someone (the chatbot) who should know more than you but has studied little and therefore knows the lesson a little by hearsay (therefore it is always better to check everything). If you do so, you will find surprising contents and ideas in your web research activity. And then accept the advice he gives you for managing the conversation. At the end of each question – or Prompt, to use the right terms – Bing Chat offers you three prompts to continue the conversation and delve into the topics.
The question of mathematics
For example, if you are having fun learning something new that you know nothing about, the advice is to let yourself be guided. And to keep an eye on the sources. The text of the answer – not all the sentences, but almost – has small numbers indicating the sources. If you click them, it takes you to the site or article where the text is taken from. So somehow Bing Chat tells you who told it. A warning: you will find authoritative sources and unknown sites. Let’s say that the algorithm that the system uses to choose the sources is not known, in the sense that it is not transparent. And it’s a problem, because the seductive potential of a software that greets you and tells you things like a human being is immensely greater than that of a search engine that provides a list of links.