Prof. Emily M. Bender(she/her)Dec 4, 2022

With #Galactica and #ChatGPT I'm seeing people again getting excited about the prospect of using language models to "access knowledge" (i.e. instead of search engines). They are not fit for that purpose --- both because they are designed to just make shit up and because they don't support information literacy. Chirag Shah and I lay this out in detail in our CHIIR 2022 paper:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3498366.3505816

>>

Situating Search | Proceedings of the 2022 Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval

ACM Conferences
Show threadProf. Emily M. Bender(she/her)Dec 4, 2022

For a lay introduction to these ideas, see these two popular press pieces:

https://www.technologyreview.com/2022/03/29/1048439/chatbots-replace-search-engine-terrible-idea/

https://www.washington.edu/news/2022/03/14/qa-preserving-context-and-user-intent-in-the-future-of-web-search/

Chatbots could one day replace search engines. Here’s why that’s a terrible idea.

Language models are mindless mimics that do not understand what they are saying—so why do we pretend they’re experts?

MIT Technology Review
Show threadL Thorne McCartyDec 4, 2022
@emilymbender

This thread from Twitter makes a similar argument with some background information about Google's search strategy:

https://twitter.com/deliprao/status/1599098378172104704?t=QlQFV6P3OServvtYepryHg&s=19
@[email protected] on Twitter

“Despite the amazing results I’ve experienced with ChatGPT, this is not a correct way to look at LLM vs. Google search. Since several other tweets have made this equivalence and have been eager to spell doom for Google, let’s examine the details:”

Twitter
Show threadProf. Emily M. Bender(she/her)
@ltmccarty The initial proposals that Shah & I were reacting to in our paper came from ... Google (including Sundar Pichai himself at GoogleIO).
Dec 4, 2022 at 7:10pmWeb