AI is becoming more and more popular these days. Everywhere you go you can find people using ChatGPT to do their homework, using Dall-E to generate stunning images, or to help in other, niche tasks. However, more than ever AI which is open to anyone without monetery incentive is in danger. Microsoft is picking up AI Chatting Capabilities with "New Bing", their attempt at gaining back users for the search engine. It's designed to scan the internet for content, summarize it, extract useful information and then present said information to the user. Sounds great, doesn't it? Well, I think there is some serious problems we have to discuss first.

Money!

The first major painpoint that comes to mind is simple: For-Profit Companies. Microsoft intends to make money by gaining more users like this, and they're likely to succeed too as they partner up with OpenAI. How do they wanna do this? of course, advertisements!

It is almost inevitable that the Chat functionality, but also other parts of "New Bing" will be supported by ads, but that makes us wonder, how do you put ads into an AI chat? Simple! You make it prioritize data from advertisers. For example:

Hey, what is the best phone currently available?

The best phones currently available include: {Sponsor}, Phone A, Phone B...
{Sponsored device} is especially good because...

Thanks!

In this example, The AI would only give further information on the sponsored device, and not the other ones. For that, you'd have to specifically ask it to do so.

This is something that might become more prevalent over time, so we will have to learn how to differentiate between actual answers and adverts to be able to reliably use this tech.

The Social Aspect

With more and more people using ChatGPT (and soon Bing) to answer lots of their questions, assuming that their answers are based on things said by actual humans on the internet or checked facts, there will be a growing number of people which will not check whether the information they're being given is correct.

We already see this nowadays outside of AI, especially in newer generations. TikTok is a prime example: Many people on TikTok (or who are using TikTok) don't fact-check things that they see on the platform.

When people assume that Bing or ChatGPT take information from factual sources, they will trust them blindly. Especially if there is going to be a feature that highlights the sources of information. This means that misinformation that Bing or ChatGPT commonly emphasise will be easier to spread, especially with Bing having a much broader audience than some tech-nerds and students which use ChatGPT.

Privacy

Privacy is another concern when it comes to this tech being used in general consumer-products, especially a search engine.

Searching for things on the internet is already notoriously not private, as seen by Google's public image, or how alternative search engines with privacy as their selling point are a thing. Search is something that should stay private, which (sadly) just so happens to go against the way that Microsoft likely intends to make money using Bing: Targeted Advertisements. With an AI that will most likely learn from the conversations that you have with it, on a search engine that is already known for collecting data on you, it really sounds like a recipe for disaster for your own privacy.

Especially as this data could be used on other websites which use Microsoft's advertising services too, like DuckDuckGo for instance, so even when you're not using Bing that data might still be getting used!

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The direction that we're headed with AI really seems like one which people would just swallow whole once more, as it usually is with these big companies introducing new tech with the end goal of making money. It's something that I sincerely hoped wouldn't happen, but as usual, profit has priority for these companies.

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The first Blogpost of 2023! Took me a while to find something interesting to write about, but happy new year nonetheless!