Who would've thought something could replace Google

ChatGPT's chatty search is very useful but let's not pretend that it can be creative in any authentic way

- MANU JOSEPH

It has been many weeks since I googled anything. Not because I know everything now. I have moved to ChatGPT. A year ago, it would've been unthinkable to me that anything would replace Google Search, a two-decade-long habit of peering into a void of stuff. In this triumph of ChatGPT, much is said about its conversational talent. But its ability to mimic a human chat is just a gimmick, no matter the great tech that went into it. It is a cultural artifact from a time when the 'Turing test' had value. Alan Turing, widely regarded as one of the fathers of AI, proposed that a machine could be said to be intelligent if its conversation was indistinguishable from that of a human. That is an obsolete qualifier now. In any case, there are TV anchors who cannot mimic a human conversation. What's interesting about AI's pantomime of human conversation is that it has demonstrated why a good search query has to be a conversation. I don't understand how I managed to search the web all these years without chatting with a bot.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is not creative and people who are impressed by its 'creativity' are those who are not creative. AI's attempt at imagination reminds me of charlatans who wing their way through life. But when it comes to search, this is the first time in years I've felt a piece of technology has genuinely improved my life.