I have not yet set myself to encounter or experiment with ChatGPT, the chat bot built on top of the GPT-3 natural language processing A.I. model that is quickly taking the world by storm. I don’t know how I feel about supporting the growth of an artificial intelligence platform through my own usage of it that will continue to train it. It’s almost like loading a bullet into the Terminator’s weapon (you know, Arnold Schwarzenegger kind of stuff), preparing it to return in the future to plug us into the matrix. But in all seriousness, your essentially training someone else’s product with data for its own benefit. I don’t know if that is good or bad.
Anyway, Google has flipped a switch to publicly translate its own chat bot to be released for public use with its search engine, as ChatGPT threatens to pull market share significantly towards Microsoft’s search engine, Bing. The incorporation of these chat bots – and the language processing technology it sits on – into popular internet search platforms very well may change the way the average individual interacts with the internet – for better or for worse.
Having seen some examples of ChatGPT in use, my mind has run to a theory over the near term on how this might affect our engagement with the internet. It could take away from the content creator’s ambitions, eliminate deep dives into knowledge, and essentially, monopolize user time from the standpoint of your preferred search engine. Here’s my thought on how these new platforms may blanket the internet for the average user:
I start inquiring into ChatGPT (or any similar product) and I can essentially receive the information I am looking for directly through this search as a summarization. Rather than running an internet search of “Prehistoric ages in time and their different dinosaurs,” I can now request “Tell me a summary of what dinosaurs existed in which age of their era.” That is a rather basic and dull request for the new platform, but you get what I am saying in a sense of ChatGPT is just going to spit the information requested at you, rather than you visiting a legitimate web page built by someone else on the manner to see the information directly. I go to Bing, and Bing tells me everything I want to know about dinosaurs, right there on Bing.com. No need to go to National Geographic anymore.
If users are engaging and finding information directly through the ChatGPT enhanced platform, as a content creator on the internet, why would I want to articulate ideas and content that is going to gain less traffic, seeing less viewership, hurting my personal benefit from posting content, and contribute to the breadth of unlimited knowledge that a natural language processor is accumulating by scraping the web? The content creator’s content is getting viewed, perhaps over time, mostly by artificial intelligence, not the viewer. A viewer of my own piece of information isn’t going understand it the way I articulate it, but rather, see a summarization through ChatGPT. As a content creator, I am just napping underneath the blanket that covers the internet by the chat bot search engine and its underlying platform’s abilities.
That leads to the thought that the search engine, if not the fundamental home page of the internet already, could become the holder of your time as you scrape over the vastness of big data using the newest features of the search engine’s new tools. I could hypothetically collect whatever information I want, accompanied by a significant amount of detail, directly through the output of a search query, not having to experience the insignificance of going down to the source (the actual web pages themselves). Bing or Google could be the one stop shop to the internet. One web page to rule them all, one web page to find them, one web page to bring them all, and in the darkness bind them; in the land of technology where the shadows lie. Maybe Tolkien was onto something (Lord of the Rings).
Artificial intelligence could hypothetically axe the internet, as the internet axed the library, at least in some form. Maybe we just started to sprint after crawling for a while. Maybe we’re walking and will be sprinting tomorrow. I don’t know. These are just hypothetical thoughts as to the direction natural language processors could go. But if I am thinking of it, someone else likely is too, and perhaps, it’d be best to keep a critical level out of one eye as we move forward with it all.
Side note: what would the actualization of this do to the internet advertising market?
nu-Box 
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