Long before chatbots, we had search bars. You would type in keywords and expect to be thrown links across your way. And the expectation is; one of those links would provide an answer to your worldly concerns. With page rank, search history and GPS location, it became possible for search engines to provide quality links to quench your thirst. With all this information, search engines had to do all the backend heavy lifting to correlate all the above and guess with high accuracy about what exactly are you searching for. There is always a plausible deniability, since this is all conjecture up to this point.
Now comes Chatbots powered by Generative AI(GenAI). A conversational assistant that is to replace an adept human on the other end of the pipe. Don't get me wrong. Chatbots have been there since search engine, but our interaction with these bots never met our expectation. (i,e) typing in a our thoughts and expecting a coherent answer, not a bunch of coagulated gibberish. The information to generate a good answer has always been there and it has been growing at a pace outrunning disk capacities to index and store them. With Large Language Models(LLMs) to predict text and Transformer architecture to provide better context, we have reached a pivotal moment to generate text spewed by Chatbots that is almost human.
With ChatGPT, Bard and many others, it is prophesied to become the replacement for search bar. (i,e) you type in your ask and you get answers to read, instead of links to peruse. Eg: If you type in "plan my dinner", GenAI would give you a list of things to consider for your dinner like recipe, time, number of people to cook for and stuff like that... instead of just giving you links to other blog posts.
IIUC, one of the reasons that Google did not release this type of functionality before(even though they authored the research paper on Transformers) is to not to eat their own lunch. The shear amount of processing power needed to generate this type of content is way more than just spitting out relevant links. So the profit per query goes down comparatively(This highlights the need for Antitrust and competition).
Search terms by themselves do not mean much unless you can tie that to your search history providing a pattern, thereby helping the algorithm to provide better links that suit your need. Search engines would allow information collected from User 1 to be used for User 2 also, if the search terms and patterns are similar. Eg: If you type in "stream oscars for free" and which ever link that you clicked finally and stopped your search, would be first link to pop in someone else's answer, if they use similar search terms.
With GenAI and Chatbots, you type in exactly what you want rather than search terms related to your thoughts. Now this gives companies like OpenAI and Google your exact thoughts compared to conjecture with search terms and history. IMO, this reveals far more information(intention) about the user, compared to earlier search bar. Chatbots used in therapy, dating apps are prone for mis-use by bad actors due to personal intimate details that we are prone to share in those conversations(hint: blackmail). More people tend to use Chatbots for above purposes, because of their prevalance and in many cases actually helpful. They are more prevalent now, since it is easy to have therapy Chatbots instances, rather than paying an actual human therapist(hint: High college tuition). If something is free to consume, then you the consumer are the product that is being sold.
Plagiarism, hallucinations are few among many issues that plague GenAI. OpenAI and Google are working on these with attributions and grounding respectively, to mitigate these unintended consequences. Attribution only goes so far about fixing issues related to paid content. In a subscription economy, each time a content is used by a unique user, then it should result in revenue, compared to earlier one time purchase and use it however you want.
In conclusion, LLM and Transformer architecture have opened up a million ways to help evolve our species to a bright future, but also opened a can of mutated worms that needs to be dealt with. But that is history repeating itself with the likes of Industrialization, Internet and Web 2.0. I consider Web 3.0 a small tribal evolution compared to Web 2.0, a revolution in the way we generate and share data(information).
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