'Put glue on your pizza' embodies everything wrong with AI search — is SearchGPT ready to change that?

The role of artificial intelligence (AI) in iNFLuencing how we use the web looks set to increase inexorably, especially with OpenAI — the company behind ChatGPT — teasing SearchGPT. This is an AI-powered search tool designed to serve up direct answers to your queries rather than pages of ‘optimized’ results.

If you’re experiencing a sudden burst of déjà vu, that’s because Google has already tried something similar. Using its Gemini AI model, Google trialed its "AI Overviews" tool which, like SearchGPT, is designed to scour the web and provide suMMArized answers to search queries. The simple idea was that this tool would give you a suMMAry of the core information you wanted without needing you to pursue a load of search results.

Only it didn’t really work — at least at first. In some egregious examples, Google's AI told users to add glue to their pizza sauce to give it "more tackiness," suggested washing clothes with the toxic gas chlorine, and even noted that a solution to feeling depressed would be jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. The issue here was that while AI Overviews could pull information from a mass of sources, it appeared to be no good at separating satirical, incorrect or malicious information from useful and correct information.

SearchGPT is underpinned by ChatGPT, which is arguably a more mature AI model than Gemini, and so could yield better results with less heinous answers. However, the tool is at a prototype stage so nobody knows how it will perform when released to the public.

Related: Researchers gave AI an 'inner monologue' and it massively improved its performance

But it does raise the question of how effective the role of AI will be in the future — if finessed, is there potential for AI to kill off traditional search engines, or will the accuracy of AI search remain a let down?

Robust not rampant

"Current AI has a lot of inconsistencies because it isn't very cohesive. The thinking patterns can go in strange, ditsy directions. However, research shows that it's possible to design models to think much more effectively,” Nell Watson, an AI researcher at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), told Live Science. Some models can be married with logical programming languages such as Prolog to greatly increase their reasoning capabilities, she said, meaning that mathematical processes can be trustworthy.