While many people enjoy playing with chatbots, journalist Victoria Song felt a little intimidated by Google’s SGE. (Source: Adobe Stock)

Search Generative Experience Gives Writer Confusing Computer Experience

The amount of change currently taking place in computing is challenging to keep up with. Lately, it seems like every day there is another huge jump in what computers are capable of.

In all likelihood, you are already getting involved with ChatGPT or Jasper or one of several versions of chatbots released to the public. This week theverge.com has the latest news from the Google I/O convention and how we can get the most from Google’s chatbots by using the right prompt. There is an amazing amount of difference in what the chatbot will give you depending on how you talk to it.

Google I/O 2023 was held on May 10. While many of the talks and presentations at I/O are developer-focused, the event started, as always, with a flashy keynote address to let us all know what Google’s been up to lately. This year, that includes both hardware and software — and, as you might imagine, lots and lots of talk about AI. In particular, a portion of the show explains how to prompt the SGE that Google introduced.

During its demo of Duet AI, a series of tools that will live inside Gmail, Docs, and more, Google showed off a feature called Sidekick that can proactively offer you prompts that change based on the Workspace document you’re working on. In other words, it’s prompting you on how to prompt it by telling you what it can do.

That showed up again later in the keynote when Google demonstrated its new AI search results, called Search Generative Experience (SGE). SGE takes any question you type into the search bar and generates a mini report, or a “snapshot,” at the top of the page.

The author of this article is Victoria Song, who includes her interactions with SGE in the story. In fact, she asks ChatGPT to write a review in the style of Victoria Song. She was surprised and perhaps a little taken aback at how well the AI not only captured her style but surpassed it in some ways.

The SGE snapshots also prompt you on what to ask it next. (Source: Google)

Her Husband Wins The Bet

A few weeks ago, my spouse and I made a bet. I said there was no way ChatGPT could believably mimic my writing style for a smartwatch review. I’d already asked the bot to do that months ago, and the results were laughable.

My spouse bet that they could ask ChatGPT the exact same thing but get a much better result. My problem, they said, was I didn’t know the right queries to ask to get the answer I wanted.

To my chagrin, they were right. ChatGPT wrote much better reviews than me when my spouse did the asking.
Song continued:

This is just ChatGPT. Google’s pitching goes a step further. Duet AI is meant to pull contextual data from your emails and documents and intuit what you need (which is hilarious since I don’t even know what I need half the time). SGE is designed to answer your questions — even those that don’t have a “right” answer — and then anticipate what you might ask next. For this more intuitive AI to work, programmers have to make it so the AI knows what questions to ask users so that users, in turn, can ask it the right questions. This means that programmers have to know what questions users want to be answered before they’ve even asked them.

‘It gives me a headache thinking about it,’ writes Song.

The one question most novices have about the chatbot revolution is this: How will AI change and impact my life? The problem is that nobody has a good answer for that yet, including the AI bots. And I don’t think we’ll get any satisfactory answer until everyone takes the time to rewire their brains to speak with AI more fluently.

Not only will the SGE answer your questions, but it will also give you prompts to make it give better answers. So try not to bore your chatbot with mundane questions. Spice it up.

This is an entertaining and informative piece of writing that we recommend to everyone, even if they aren’t using chatbot technology yet.

read more at theverge.com