SUBSCRIBE NOW!

Vol. 40 No. 8 — October 2023

Not only is GPT-4 stunning in its abilities, but it shows that AI is advancing far faster than most experts had predicted. It’s either the dawn of an age of AI-driven benevolence or a descent to a civilization-ending apocalypse. Meanwhile, students in droves rush to have ChatGPT write their papers for them. This furor has heated up an arms race among AI developers—from giants like Microsoft and Google to numerous smaller players—to bring out the next new and improved shiny AI object. One of the first out of the gate was the new Bing.

THE NEW BING

Bing, a Microsoft property, has long occupied a tiny share (3%) of the web search market. Microsoft also has a large stake in OpenAI. Bolting ChatGPT onto Bing seemed like a win-win for Microsoft: a new platform for ChatGPT and the opportunity to revive its moribund search engine. The new Bing had a limited release in February 2023—accompanied by some embarrassing, high-profile incorrect information, called hallucinations. After frantic tweaking, a general public release followed in May.

A free Microsoft account is required. Microsoft recommends using its Edge browser or a mobile app (which accepts voice input) for best performance. The new Bing keeps its regular web search engine, with a side panel for the AI version, which uses GPT-4. There are several modules, but the two principal ones are:

• Chat, a search tool
• Compose, a content creator

My research consisted of dozens of sear­ches on these modules, with a large variety of subjects and query types. Most of my searches were reference-type queries, rather than creative prompts or shopping/travel topics. Nevertheless, the information I’m sharing is admittedly just a small sample of the new Bing’s performance.

BING CHAT

Chat searches the web with GPT-4 and, according to Bing documentation, states that it draws on GPT-4-trained content at times. I came across no chats that indicated trained content was used (I don’t know that it would be identified if it were). OpenAI provided plugins for ChatGPT Plus, including a web browser, which allows it to perform real-time web searching. In my tests, results for the same search in ChatGPT Plus and Bing were similar but not identical. Let’s assess Bing Chat on composition, sources, accuracy, timeliness, and search modifications.

Composition

Chat is a very good writer, using proper grammar and spelling, clear sentence structure, and good organization. Concise replies answer your query directly and specifically; it even seems to intuit what you really want when your query is a little murky. Chat is well-mannered and modest. It declines chats that are illicit, rude, or insensitive. It admits if it’s confused and asks you to clarify. It’s also very fast, with the reply usually delivered in a minute or so.

Sources

A reply typically cites five web sources, though sometimes more. Very broadly speaking, they include news, reference, and other reputable content-rich sites. Wikipedia is often cited. In the reply, individual sentences are footnoted to the source for easy referral to the provenance of the statement. The same search in regular Bing and the new Bing usually has several sources in common.

Accuracy

My chats included many topics of which I have some personal knowledge, and I found Bing’s replies to be accurate. This is by no means a claim that Bing is always mistake-free; my sample was very small, and I certainly may have missed errors. Other reports cite errors, so my results may be somewhat anomalous. Following widespread publicity about hallucinations in ChatGPT, as well as aggressive language reported by users of the new Bing’s February release, developers labored to improve the algorithm’s accuracy.

Chat usually writes in a balanced, non-partisan style, but it can get political. For instance, the chats for current controversial topics such as election deniers, book banning, and independent state legislature theory editorialized in support of left-wing progressive views.

Timeliness

I frequently checked to see if Bing covered a breaking news story and found that it usually did so.

Search Modifications

Chat has useful features for modifying results. Replies can be written in three different Tones: Creative, Precise, and Balanced. Each uses the same basic information but phrases it differently. Creative is a light conversational style that includes remarks or comments. Precise is a strictly impersonal, facts-only style. Balanced works to achieve a middle ground between Creative and Precise. This feature wasn’t in the original February release and reportedly was added so that users could choose the presumably more accurate Precise tone.

The new Bing is adept at offering follow-up searches on aspects of your original chat. These demonstrate high-level comprehension of the overall topic and a keen sense for what good follow-up questions are.

COMPOSE

Compose is the new Bing’s ghostwriter, which constructs a written response to a prompt. It offers three templates to shape style and format:

• Tones offers five different styles, from the formal Professional to other, more conversational styles.
• Format offers paragraph, dot-point, etc.
• Length has Short, Medium, and Long.

There are also ways to specify compositional elements in the prompt itself: age level, genre (poetry or even sonnet), person (1st, 2nd, 3rd), tense (past, present, future), etc. Compose’s default response does not include citations, but if requested, it will provide sources with unlinked URLs. Compose’s ability to write skillfully with all of these content and stylistic requirements is uncanny. A piece written in Professional Tone is as formal and impersonal as the abstract of a technical journal, while a first-person meditation can be written with something like emotions.

Like Chat, Compose offers follow-up suggestions to change the original piece. These are very sharp at sensing what you are trying to do and providing helpful advice. One thing that Compose will not do is indulge bad behavior. Like Chat, Compose will politely decline prompts that involve illegality, bigotry, cruelty, or even boorish manners.

THE NEW BING AND AI SEARCH

AI applications in search have been around for a long time, but ChatGPT and the new Bing represent a new and very different era. Even their developers claim that they don’t know exactly how these things work. Accordingly, searchers—whe­ther professional or consumer—are at the mercy of these dense black boxes. We can apply whatever fact-checking methods we may have or simply trust them, hope for the best, and clean up the messes afterward.

There is another profound consequence of this transition: the disintermediation of the content container—or, in plain language, the end of the book. For thousands of years, the purpose of search tools has been to identify information-containing items: manuscripts, books, articles, web documents, etc. Then it fell to the user to extract information from the container itself. The new Bing does away with this last-mile work. It finds the sources, analyzes them, extracts the relevant data, and merges them into a coherent, organized presentation that can be better than what most humans could compose. A new Bing chat response is, in effect, a literature review, except that, unlike human literature reviews that take many, many hours, Bing’s takes a minute or so.

The many serious concerns about this new era of search are legitimate and widely discussed. However, they are not going to hold back this tsunami. Information professionals must learn how to ride the wave or get swept under.