OpenAI’s Search Tool Has Already Made a Mistake

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Whenever AI companies present a vision for the role of artificial intelligence in the future of searching the internet, they tend to underscore the same points: instantaneous summaries of relevant information; ready-made lists tailored to a searcher’s needs. They tend not to point out that generative-AI models are prone to providing incorrect, and at times fully made-up, information—and yet it keeps happening. Early this afternoon, OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, announced a prototype AI tool that can search the web and answer questions, fittingly called SearchGPT. The launch is designed to hint at how AI will transform the ways in which people navigate the internet—except that, before users have had a chance to test the new program, it already appears error prone.

In a prerecorded demonstration video accompanying the announcement, a mock user types music festivals in boone north carolina in august into the SearchGPT interface. The tool then pulls up a list of festivals that it states are taking place in Boone this August, the first being An Appalachian Summer Festival, which according to the tool is hosting a series of arts events from July 29 to August 16 of this year. Someone in Boone hoping to buy tickets to one of those concerts, however, would run into trouble. In fact, the festival started on June 29 and will have its final concert on July 27. Instead, July 29–August 16 are the dates for which the festival’s box office will be officially closed. (I confirmed these dates with the festival’s box office.)

• AI’s real hallucination problem: “Audacity can quickly turn into a liability when builders become untethered from reality,” Charlie Warzel wrote this week, “or when their hubris leads them to believe that it is their right to impose their values on the rest of us, in return for building God.”
• Generative AI can’t cite its sources: “It is unclear whether OpenAI, Perplexity, or any other generative-AI company will be able to create products that consistently and accurately cite their sources,” I wrote earlier this year, “let alone drive any audiences to original sources such as news outlets. Currently, they struggle to do so with any consistency.”