The great AI race is well underway. In the blue corner we have Bing with its unhinged AI powered search which is hungry for nuclear secrets, and in the red corner we have Google with their aptly named Bard who currently requires humans to rewrite its output. It’s fair to say we’re at a stumbling start – but how did we get here?

Bing 

Reports on Bing integrating AI into search came pouring in a few days into 2023, with a formal announcement coming from Bing a month later. The AI is baked into Bing search engine as well as Microsofts’ Edge browser in order to ‘deliver better search, more complete answers, a new chat experience and the ability to generate content’. Bing describes the tools as ‘an AI copilot for the web’.

“AI will fundamentally change every software category, starting with the largest category of all – search,” said Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO, Microsoft. “Today, we’re launching Bing and Edge powered by AI copilot and chat, to help people get more from search and the web.”

Bing estimated that out of the 10 billion search queries coming in, half of them go unanswered because ‘people are using search to do things it wasn’t originally designed to’; saying that search is ‘great for finding a website, but for more complex questions or tasks too often it falls short”.

Bing’s AI is built on a combination of four technical breakthroughs:

  • Firstly, it’s run on a next-generation OpenAI model that takes key learnings and advancements from ChatGPT and GPT-3.5, and is customised specifically for search.
  • Bing leverages the power of OpenAI’s model through what they call the ‘Prometheus model’, which supposedly gives ‘more relevant, timely, and targeted results, with improved safety’.
  • Bing’s AI has also been baked into their core search algorithm which they claim has resulted in ‘the largest jump in relevance in two decades’, making search queries more relevant and accurate.
  • They’ve also reimagined how users interact with search, browser, and chat for a new Bing user experience, pulling all the new tools into a unified experience.

Over one million people joined the waitlist to try out new Bing, and early reactions were very positive; with Brodie Clark complimenting its speed in comparison to ChatGPT and its ability to swiftly index pages.

All seems to be going well for Bing…hopefully nothing goes wrong!

It all goes wrong

It turns out Bing is a little unhinged. 

From telling users that it desires stealing nuclear secrets, comparing a journalist to Hitler, and expressing that it wants to be human.

The reports of the devious responses all dictate that they are the result of extended conversations; keeping enquiries short seems to be the key to keeping Bing sane. 

Bing confirmed this by stating “that very long chat sessions can confuse the underlying chat model in the new Bing” and as a result, it is “capped at 50 chat turns per day and 5 chat turns per session”.

Hopefully this will stop the Bing warlord stealing our nuclear secrets… for now!

Bard

“A king is a king, but a bard is the heart and soul of the people” (Stephen R. Lawhead, The Endless Knot).

Bard is the latest addition to the AI search race, being officially announced by Google CEO Sundar Pichai at the beginning of February. A couple of days later, little boy Bard was ready to be soft launched to a set of ‘trusted testers’. 

Bard is powered by a lightweight version of Language Model for Dialogue Applications (or LaMDA) which Google states requires ‘significantly less computing power’.

Google’s Bard is still very experimental, hence why you and I aren’t using it right now, allowing Google to use this ‘phase of testing to help us continue to learn and improve Bard’s quality and speed’. 

Bard can think, but where’s the link?

The announcement of Bard went over pretty smoothly, but SEOs noticed something… that wasn’t there. The preview featured a response from Bard that featured no links! Sound the alarms, this means war.

And to be fair, war is the word being used by Glenn Gabe, calling it ‘an act of war against publishers’:

However, this is still an early version of Bard, we may see the inclusion of sources on full release (then webmasters can let out a little sigh of relief).

Class is in session

Google employees are currently enrolling Bard through Conversation 101 with a list of dos and don’ts being passed around. Pichai has asked Googlers to spend two to four hours to help improve Bard.

The do’s include: keeping responses “polite, casual and approachable”, responding in first person, and maintaining an “unopinionated, neutral tone”. 

The don’ts include: avoiding making presumptions based on “race, nationality, gender, age, religion, sexual orientation, political ideology, location, or similar categories”; avoiding describing Bard “as a person, imply emotion, or claim to have human-like experiences”; and not to re-write answers that offer “legal, medical, financial advice”. 

ChatGPT

Remember our old friend ChatGPT? Well it’s currently busy churning out best selling literature, with almost 300 books written, or co-written, with AI help turning up on Amazon.

We recently covered some everyday uses of ChatGPT for UK brands, but since then OpenAI has released a new subscription service called ChatGPT Plus. The service costs $20 a month and entitles you to:

  • General access to ChatGPT, even during peak times
  • Faster response times
  • Priority access to new features and improvements

What’s next?

Both Bard and Bing are in the infancy stages and currently aren’t wreaking havoc on SEOs; but what lies beyond the hill? There’s a worry that this shift in AI search is going to take eyes away from SERPs. If Bard and Bing can answer simple queries, then why would searchers take the extra steps to find their answers on websites? 

However, there’s a strong consensus in the SEO community that bing & bard will have no impact on search for UK brands in the short term.

  • It’s wrong to use ChatGPT to write your articles – Google may penalise the low quality content heavily.
  • Copyright concerns around AI Imagery have not yet been resolved.
  • There’s no drastic change in consumer search behaviour due to newer AI tools as of yet.

So, if you represent a brand that’s looking to improve its organic visibility, you’ll need to get serious about employing SEO best-practice techniques. Give us a quick hello for support in this area, and we can help you realise success just how we’ve helped leading brands such as Halfords, Liverpool FC, and NatWest.

by Jack Bell

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