Bing Is a Trap

A Microsoft spokesperson is typing something into a search engine, and it isn’t quite working. I’m watching this unfold at a Microsoft press event in Manhattan that’s meant to show off new features on Bing, the company’s Google rival. In this demonstration, a chatbot is supposed to respond to a user’s query with an embedded video. Typing on a large computer monitor in full view of several journalists, the staffer asks the program for instructions to tie a tie. But instead of a video, Bing generates an absurd heap of text—so many words about looping and knotting fabric set against a sterile white speech bubble. It reminds me of a Times New Roman resource page you would see on a professor’s old website.

Everyone in the crowd recognizes that this output is useless. (Even tie-a-tie.net, the oldest necktie-related resource I can find on the web, knew the score in 2003: Its how-to pages for styles such as the Windsor and the Pratt had illustrations.) Another Microsoft rep makes a joke about how the glitch proves the point—it really would be useful for the AI to show a video in this particular context—and we move on. They try something else, and it works: The Bing bot gives a short answer to a question about skiing and then plops a YouTube video in the chat bubble.

It is functional, if not inspiring—a mismatch, almost, for the luxe setup at the Microsoft Experience Center in Midtown, where journalists gathered yesterday amid pricey-looking spring bouquets (the lilies smelled fantastic) and with unrestricted access to a complimentary smoothie bar. The tech corporation, which has taken an early lead in the generative-AI race, was excited to present what it calls “the next wave of AI innovation.” Its vision is to transform the way people gather information and learn things from the internet. In immediate terms, that means opening Bing’s chatbot up today to anyone with a Microsoft account; incorporating new types of media into search, like video embeds and visual charts; plug-ins that will allow a service like OpenTable to operate within the chat platform; and more. The juice is flowing.

Microsoft says this is the future of search. There’s been a lot of talk like that since last November, when OpenAI released ChatGPT and seemed to turn the world on its head: A new breed of artificial intelligence is suddenly more capable and, crucially, more accessible than many would have thought possible. (Microsoft has invested billions in OpenAI and is using the company’s technology in Bing.) Every new day brings with it a different angle through which to view the prism: Perhaps the chatbots will aid us at work, precipitate a crisis of online spam, make us more creative mixologists, and/or redefine the nature of nuclear war. When it comes to search in particular, however, chatbots might just be dismally unimaginative. My takeaway from seeing Bing in action was not that AI-powered search was likely to expand the scope of human knowledge and lead us to new frontiers online. Instead, Microsoft has crushed AI into a piece of productivity software that makes the internet feel smaller.

The problem, in a nutshell, is consolidation—a new twist on an issue that has plagued the internet for the past decade and a half or so, as social-media giants, cloud providers, and, well, Google have leveraged market advantages and the absence of meaningful regulation to dominate our experiences of the web. Four years ago, the journalist Kashmir Hill found it nearly impossible to eliminate Microsoft, Amazon, Apple, Google, and Facebook services from her life. Think about how much of the time spent on your phone is filtered through the same few services every day. You might still use a handful of different websites and apps, but fewer than the seemingly limitless scope of the internet might suggest.

The Bing bot, alongside ChatGPT, Google’s Bard, and numerous competitors, augurs a more drastic streamlining. Imagine every crayon in the world melted into one dark glob and pinched through a funnel. Where once you went to a search engine to find another website to go to, you will now go to a search engine and stay on that search engine. For example, say I go to a typical, chatbotless search engine such as Ask.com and type an everyday query like “How do I clean mud off of leather shoes?” I’ll receive a list of links, from various outlets and perspectives, and I will click one of those links to hopefully find my answer. But now I can pull up the Bing chatbot and type that same thing; it will present a six-step answer inline, no outside navigation required. Bing cites links, but the entire product is engineered to give you an answer within its chat interface. That is, clearly, the selling point.

I floated the idea that Bing’s chatbot might make the internet feel smaller during a brief interview with Yusuf Mehdi, the corporate vice president and consumer chief marketing officer at Microsoft. He had called the product a “co-pilot,” something that could aid people who are cumulatively running 10 billion search queries a day across the internet. This articulation is telling: A co-pilot is essential. You wouldn’t want to take a flight without one. And on the internet, essentials become entrenched. Once, there was no Facebook, no Instagram, no Google or iCloud; now, for many, it is hard to imagine life, let alone the internet, without them. Digital technology is often positioned by companies in terms of expanding possibilities, but the ultimate effect is constraining them. When asked if the new Bing was designed to keep you on Bing, rather than wandering elsewhere, Mehdi said he viewed the issue as a “potential risk” but fundamentally believes that Bing’s chatbot will be a kind of liberatory force, freeing people from the time-consuming process of traditional search as it stands. “What else can I learn about the world? What else can I go see? We’re just trying to take out a lot of the menial labor of what people are doing and speed them to get to what they want,” he said.

It seemed he also felt there was an elephant in the room: Namely, that I work as a journalist in an especially brutal time for online media. Bing and other chatbot-powered search engines could be a threat to publications if the search platforms discourage people from clicking over to the original stories from which information is drawn. “For us, it’s absolutely a goal that we drive more traffic to content publishers, no questions asked,” Mehdi told me. “Like, it’s in our metrics internally.” He explained the logic: Publishers need clicks to sell ads against, and the chatbot needs content from publishers to offer anything to users. That’s kind of true, kind of not: By its very nature, the AI has been trained on so much existing material online that most searches outside of breaking-news events are already well covered. I probably wouldn’t pour money into a new website about how to tie a tie.

I nudged again. Why is this goal important to you? He answered: “For us, it’s important that the traffic is there, that it’s working, that publishers say, ‘Yeah, we like Bing; we like Bing chat. It’s getting us traffic; it’s getting us volume.’” Then came another tell. Ideally, publishers would be so impressed by Bing’s chatbot that they would want to integrate their services with it. “As we talked about today, we want to have plug-ins,” he said. “We’d like to have people build plug-ins on that.”

And that made more sense. You could wait for the traffic to come to your site. Or you could just build something that fits in the machine’s little white text box. It is, after all, the future.