Chatbots Don't Look Things Up

Transcript

The dog ate my... You said "homework," right? You didn't look that up. Neither does a chatbot.

You've heard that one a thousand times, so you predicted. A chatbot does the same thing, one word at a time, from an enormous pile of writing.

Inside, every word sits on a kind of map. Words that mean similar things sit close together. Car sits near truck, not carpet, because car and truck show up around the same words: drive, road, engine. Nobody typed that in. It worked it out from the text.

To write, it picks each next word from where it stands on that map and what usually comes next.

Notice what's missing. Nothing in there checks whether the sentence is true. It doesn't know what's true. It knows what should probably come next.

Some chatbots now have a search engine bolted on the front. When that kicks in, you get links. The link is the clue. An answer with no link came straight off the map, and there's nothing behind it to open.