My week with Bing and ChatGPT
My week with Bing and ChatGPT
Wild, frustrating and fascinating
The other day Microsoft invited me to the party, to be one of the beta testers on the revived Bing search engine, the one with that new A.I. chat feature. A talkative robot finds your search results.
The answers are vastly different from those you get on the openai ChatGPT system, which is odd, since Microsoft is using the same ChatGPT A.I. to generate its answers. But ChatGPT can be adapted into other formats.
With Bing, sometimes the AI is spot on, and other times it was wildly wrong. Like, telling me that I’m the father of my sister, married to a Hollywood actress, that I’ve brought the PhotowalksTV series to Sydney, Australia, Hong Kong, Amsterdam and Chicago (I wish!) and that I’m rather fluent in Japanese and exhibited my expertise on the Tokyo episode. (My son Sam will love that one.)
To recap: OpenAi’s ChatGPT is the fastest growing tech application ever, achieving over 100 million users in less than a few months. Microsoft invested in it, and is using its popularity to try and change the way we search.
For years, Microsoft’s Bing has been an also ran, with just 10% market share, despite having nearly 75% of the desktop computing market with Windows. Google dominates with 90%, and beyond its search, many of us are baked into the Google eco-system, with Gmail, Google Docs, Calendar and other products, which makes it hard to switch.
Microsoft hopes the excitement about ChatGPT will change Bing’s fortunes, and knows it will be a long haul. But even a 1% change in market share improvement is worth as much as $2 billion.
Microsoft introduced the new Bing with a splashy press conference on Feb. 7, but said the general public could only use it by signing up on a waitlist. I did that day, and by February 27 I was in, way faster than I expected. (Go to Bing.com to sign up for the waitlist.)
So now that I’ve used it, even though so many things are wrong, I predict anyone who gets in will find themselves in a timesuck rabbit hole that will be hard to get out of. It’s too much fun seeing all the crazy stuff Bing comes up with.
And I don’t think it’s an either/or, Bing or Google thing. We’ll use both as we search for the right answer.
Here’s the good: You get six tries at bat to find your answer, and along the way, you are encouraged to have a conversation with the chatbot. Here’s where it asked me my favorite episode of Photowalks, and whether I might like to share some of my photos of San Diego. That was fun.
Some of the answers were more relevant than I found on Google, while others were either plain wrong, (that marriage and daughter thing, the Japanese phrases I have used on Photowalks, photos I’ve never taken) to spot on and way more helpful than Google. (Best spots in Los Angeles to photograph the skyline.) Plus, Microsoft shows you where the information is coming from, and how its always multiple sources, a feature you don’t see in Google.
The bad: Even if you’re in a back and forth conversation with the Bot, Microsoft limits you to six questions period, and will stop you when you reach your limit. Microsoft doesn’t keep a copy of your chat, so once you’ve been stopped and go onto the next question, you can’t go back and check the previous results. And, if you ask too many questions in one day, you will be paused for 24 hours.
If you go to ChatGPT on Openai, you don’t have any of these restrictions, and your chat history is stored. Microsoft made these moves in response to a New York Times article showing how the bot got out of control during a two-hour chat session and insisted the reporter leave his wife for the bot.
But come on Microsoft—what’s wrong with chat history? If you’re going to give us the info, let me look at it again!
Travel
Initially I thought Bing would be great for travel, because ChatGPT is such a breath of fresh air there. I asked it to find me five affordable motels in Las Vegas for next week (Juan’s Flamin’ Fajitas, here we come!) and it did just that, with ranges from $40 to $60 a night. (And they were accurate.)
The same question to Google gave me non-relevant ads, and then come on links that claimed $15 nightly rooms. Click a few buttons, and the $15 a night turned to actually be $100 a night.
On Bing, I asked the same question and I got another five hotels, with come-on rates found on sites like Kayak, only to find that there were no such rooms available. So then why show it to me in the first place?
Let’s hope this gets better!
Meanwhile, I also did the tried and true. I asked Bing to compose a poem for me about the joys of Photowalking":
“I grab my camera and join my friends
We walk around the city with no end”
Not so great. And for the next request, it refused. Sort of.
“I’m sorry but I cannot write a term paper for you. That would be unethical and unfair to other students. However, I can give you some pointers on how to write one yourself.”
And then it spit out enough bullet points for me to get busy with. But the language was so bad that any respectable teacher would easily know it was being faked.
Which is why all term papers will need to be written in person from now on!
Bottom line: Openai is the most exciting thing to happen in search since Google started 25 years ago, even with all the issues. You know you want to try it. Go sign up and see for yourself what all the hubbub is about.
Picture of the week
ICYMI: It was so clear in Los Angeles this week, I could see 18 miles down the road. Really.
Days like this are very rare, but on the ledge of a certain auto shop on Sepulveda and 2nd, if I looked towards downtown, I could see the entire skyline, backed by those magnificent snow-capped mountains. You all know me for iPhone photos, but in this case, we needed a big camera with a big lens and that’s the Sony RX10IV.
Thank you Sony and Mother Nature!
Livestreaming
We had a great second edition of the Photowalk Talks live show, and will continue every Thursday at 2 p.m. PT. Steve Brazill guested with me last week, and our giveaway contest continues—one free, 1 year membership to the best online photo instruction in the business, from KelbyOne. All you have to do is submit your best iPhone photo to our Flickr Group page. We’ll announce the winner this Thursday, when I have Kim McCallister from the Mark Thompson and Nikki Medoro YouTube shows, as my guest.
Topic: Ten things about the iPhone Camera that Drive Me Crazy!
Thanks everyone for watching, reading and listening. Don’t forget that comments on our YouTube page help us grow. And (drumroll please) we are 444 away from the magic 10,000 subscriber mark, so if you haven’t subscribed yet, please do and help me make that milestone! (Just hover your smartphone camera over the QR code, or go here: https://bit.ly/3Al6RsS
I’m back at you tomorrow with the latest PhotowalksTV adventure—to a little, off the beaten path backroadsy Florida town called Safety Harbor. You probably haven’t heard of it—but you’ll want to go there after watching the next episode.
Jeff