Google, how do I ask your AI the right questions?

A few weeks ago, my husband and I made a bet. That said, ChatGPT cannot faithfully copy my writing style for smartwatch reviews. I told the bot to do this months ago, and the results were laughable. My spouse bet they could ask ChatGPT the exact same thing but they got a excess better results. My problem, he said, was I didn’t know the right questions to ask to get the answers I wanted.

To my sorrow, they were right. written by chatgpt excess better review like me When my husband asked

That memory flashed through my mind when I was blogging Google I/O. This year’s keynote was essentially a two-hour thesis on AI, how it will affect search, and all the ways it could affect it. boldness And Responsible make our life better A lot of it was neat. But when Google openly admitted that it is difficult to ask AI the right questions, a shiver ran down my spine.

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 gives you prompts based on the workspace document you’re working on. In other words, it is indicating You how to signal This By telling you what it can do.

It showed up again later in the keynote when Google showcased its new AI search results, called Search Generative Experience (SGE). SGE takes any query you type in the search bar and generates a mini report, or “snapshot,” at the top of the page. Below that snapshot are follow-up questions.

As someone whose job it is to ask questions, both demos were troubling. The queries and prompts Google uses on the platform don’t look the same as the queries I type in my search bar. My search queries often talk like a small child. (They also usually come after “reddit”, so I get non-SEO content mill answers.) Things like “bald dennis blackberry movie actor name”. When I’m searching for something written about Peloton’s 2022 earnings, I pop in “site:theverge.com Metaphors of Peloton McCarthy ship”. “What should I do for a weekend in Paris?” I wouldn’t even think of asking Google this kind of stuff.

I admit that when staring at any type of generative AI, I don’t know what to do. I can watch a billion demos, and yet, the blank window taunts me. It’s like I’m back in second grade and my grumpy teacher admonishes me for a question I don’t know the answer to. When I query something, the results I get are ridiculously garbled – things that would take me longer to render than if I were to do it myself.

My wife, on the other hand, has taken to AI like a fish to water. After our bet, I watched him play with ChatGPT for a whole hour. What impressed me the most was how different our prompts and questions were. Mine were short, open ended and wide. My wife left little room for interpretation in the AI. “You have to hold it by the hand,” he said. “You have to feed it everything you need.” Their commands and questions are hyper-specific, lengthy, and often include reference links or data sets. But even they have to rewrite the prompts and questions again and again to get what they’re looking for.

It’s just ChatGPT. Google’s pitching goes a step further. Duet AI is there to pull relevant data from your emails and documents and what you need (which is hilarious because I don’t even know I need it 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 that the AI ​​knows what questions to ask users so that users can ask it the right questions in return. This means that programmers need to know what questions users want answered before asking them. Thinking about it gives me a headache.

Not to get too philosophical, but you could say that the whole of life is about figuring out the right questions to ask. To me, the most uncomfortable thing about the AI ​​age is that I don’t think any of us know what we are. In fact Want from AI. Google says this is what it showed on stage at I/O. OpenAI thinks it’s a chatbot. Microsoft seems to think it’s a really sexy chatbot. But whenever I talk to the average person about AI these days, the question everyone wants answered is simple. How will AI change and affect My life?

Problem is, no one, not even the bots, has a good answer for that yet. And I don’t think we’ll get any satisfactory answers until everyone takes the time to rewire their brains to speak more fluently with AI.