AI and Google: Not so Different from an Investigative Perspective
Two of the best ways of explaining why a Google search is never enough in an investigation is to remind people that Google is not a neutral distributor of facts, and that it is a tool for thinkers, not a substitute for thinking. I’ve been writing and speaking on this theme for years, but now it’s time to add artificial intelligence to the conversation.
To review:
- Google is a for-profit business, and its results can be severely skewed by that fact. I wrote about this seven years ago in Surprise, Google is There to Make Money
I’ve got nothing against profit-making businesses, and run one myself. But if you use only one search engine and that search engine is Google, you will miss an awful lot. Google stacks results based on the number of clicks they have received, the ad revenue Google gets from them, and many other secret standards they don’t tell us about. A Google entry about a dry cleaner in Joplin, Missouri that has no website would not be very profitable for Google, but if that dry cleaner is the front for a financial fraud that took $250,000 from you, you would want it at the top of page one. It won’t be there and you will need to look elsewhere.
- When I wrote 13 years ago that Google is Not a Substitute for Thinking I pointed out that “most things in the world aren’t on Google.” If you Google yourself, you will find perhaps one percent of everything you know about yourself. The world’s most famous people may hit 10 percent, but a lot of that will be information they want out there – from their own websites, news releases, and tame interviews.
AI Is No Different
Generative AI is no different. It works by assembling previously written material. But if nobody ever wrote about Mr. X, he won’t appear on Google or ChatGPT (unless AI makes up material about him, which it has done before).
One of my favorite thinkers about AI is Ted Gioia, who writes The Honest Broker blog and recently touched on both of these themes in thinking about the future of AI.
His number one piece of advice is “Stop worrying about AI taking over. It’s the people who own the AI who pose the biggest threat.” He also thinks that competing AI bots backed by governments and corporations will be at war with one another, with we users in the middle.
So if Google is a business, AI is too. You will need to think of it as one source among many. Even thinking of a ChatGPT as a “starting point” is probably going too far. If ChatGPT leaves out something important and you just lightly edit what it gives you, your final work product will exclude the same important element.
As far as AI vs thinking, Gioia predicts “The bots will actually get dumber, despite trillions of dollars in investment. This huge spending actually accelerates the degradation” and that “the decline is already evident.”
The problem is that when AI bots run out of things to copy (and they are quickly vacuuming up all the data out there by moving to less-than-reliable sources such as Reddit posts), they begin to copy one another.
Google didn’t put intelligent, imaginative investigators out of business, and ChatGPT probably won’t either. It’s been around for over a year now and it’s free. I’m not free, but people keep calling our office with things for us to do.
