Not with a bang, but with a bing...

"Just Bing it." Said no one ever, at least no one outside of product placement inserted into strained dialogue in some NBC sitcoms in the the late 00's. 

"I couldn't have killed him. The killer used Google to find out
how to dispose of the body, and I only Bing. I only Bing!"

-Emphatically pro Microsoft 

suspect, Season 19, episode five

Coffee shops are filled with humans
performatively writing screenplays in public,
so why bother building software to do it?

And yet it's still around. Microsoft's also-ran search engine, I mean. And possibly Law and Order, I don't know and I'm certainly not going to Bing the question. Anyway, I mention this because the tech company is employing AI technology similar to ChatGPT to improve search responses. What's ChatGPT? Great, I'm glad I pretended you asked, because I was starting to feel out of touch. It's a fancy chatbot designed to mimic human responses. It can write anything from computer programs to music and even novels and screenplays. Not well, but it can.

I say not well, but I've not tried it myself. It wants you to create an account and I mean, for one thing, I don't need any more accounts in my life. Secondly, I'm not sure I want to be on this thing's radar when it becomes sentient. 

What I'm saying is that if you build robots that look like chrome skeletons, and then give
them guns and autonomy, you don't get to act surprised when they murder everyone. 

"Everyone's used to iOS, so I was
thinking we change it. For no reason."

-Someone at Apple

Irrational Skynet concerns aside, so what? Like, why do we need to converse with our internet search engine? We don't, obviously, but if there's one thing tech, like as an industry, loves to do, it's improve things. Ok, that's wrong, if there's one thing the tech industry loves to to it's go public, make embarrassing amounts of money, and then lay off thousands of people, but if there're two things it loves to do, the second one is improve things. And a more conversational search engine means you can use more natural speech when doing a search. 

"Oh and Siri, is it too spicy? Make sure 
it's not too spicy. Siri? Can you hear me?"

-everyone's dad

If you wanted poke, you might type "poke" into your browser. Or maybe use Siri or whatever, and say, "find a poke restaurant near me." Simple, concise keywords designed to yield a certain response. But if you've ever watched someone not super-tech savvy say, a parent, search for something online, it tends to go something like: "I would like pokey, can you find me a pokey restaurant? Near me. And one that has forks. I can't use chopsticks." It's exhausting because you know you're going to have to step in eventually, but a smarter search engine would be able to parse that rambling nonsense. 

Although if we're being honest, a
civilization where tweeting in the persona
of Appleby's is a job, isn't a healthy one.

And that's super, whatever. I suppose it's a more worthwhile use of the technology than trying to algorithmically devise social media posts which it can also do. In fact, creating content for and representing corporations on social media is probably going to end up as this thing's key application. No longer will corporations have to pay a social media coordinator to be the voice of their company, they'll simply use ChatGPT or whatever to churn out posts and targeted advertisements. Which on the one hand is a bleak portent of humans being replaced by machines.

But I suppose it's all a matter of perspective. I'd argue that anything that takes us out of the social media equation is probably a worthy cause. A future where the internet writes and reads its own bullshit and leaves the rest of us alone is one worth looking forward to. 

A future where things like Twitter are an entirely automated, closed loop of
AI generated opinions. A Human Centipede of tweets no living person ever has to read.