Bada Bing!

Dirt is a daily email about entertainment.

Terry Nguyen, Dirt’s senior staff writer, on the new Bing, tiered AMC seating, and Hermes vs. MetaBirkins.

Bing, the famously-mocked search engine, is back and better than before—so Microsoft claims. The new and improved Bing will be powered by artificial intelligence software from OpenAI, the organization behind ChatGPT. The AI-inflected search engine is currently available only to a small group of testers, but will be released to the public soon along with Microsoft’s new Edge browser. (You can join the waitlist here.)

According to NYT’s Kevin Roose, Bing “looks like a hybrid of a standard search engine and a GPT-style chatbot.” After a user types in a search query, related links and ads will propagate on the left side of their screen. In a sidebar on the right, Bing’s AI engine types out a summary response to the query, annotated with links to sites it’s retrieving information from. So far, testers have been impressed by Bing’s chatbot integration into the Edge browser: It can scan entire webpages of text for key takeaways or run comparison queries on a shopping site like Amazon. Users can also ask the bot to draft emails, messages, blog posts, or lists in varying lengths and tone, from funny and casual to professional and informative.

Google, of course, is stressed about losing its decades-long edge to Microsoft — not that Bing is going to replace Google as a transitive verb anytime soon. On Monday, Google announced that it will be releasing its own “experimental conversational AI” tool called Bard, and adding new AI-powered features to Google search. Already, however, people are pointing out a factual error Bard made in its first demo, when asked about the James Webb Space Telescope. While AI chatbots will certainly make search more streamlined and efficient, a major problem is their tendency to confidently state incorrect information as fact, according to The Verge’s James Vincent: “The systems frequently ‘hallucinate’—that is, make up information—because they are essentially autocomplete systems.”

In a December dispatch about ChatGPT, I wrote about how the debut of new AI tools always seem to generate anxiety: “There are often two loosely related recurring points of contention when it comes to AI technology: Its effects on the market for creative labor and its philosophical, ethical, and/or cultural implications.” But when applied to something as seemingly functional as search, people are more likely to get on board with OpenAI. It’s providing answers to questions they already have, and it saves them time. 

This poses a potential problem for more complex search topics. People might grow comfortable relying on reductive, AI-automated responses rather than searching for facts that inform their own conclusions. Insider’s Adam Rogers believes that the rise of AI search is fundamentally a debate about the best way to know stuff: “Do we engage with the complexity of competing information? Or do we let an authority reduce everything to a simple answer?”

PLAYBACK

Snippets of streaming news — and what we’re streaming.

• Universal Music Group is partnering with Tidal. The announcement suggests that Tidal is “stepping away from the user-centric model they were pursuing in order to take a step back and join in this new research project with UMG.” (Billboard) 

• AMC will start charging more for better theater seats as part of its Sightline program. Tiered seat pricing will be introduced this Friday in select theaters in New York City, Chicago, and Kansas City, and across the nation later this year. (Polygon)

MIXTAPE

Good links from the Dirtyverse.

• Hermès wins a trademark lawsuit against digital artist Mason Rothschild, who sold a collection of NFT “bags” called MetaBirkins. (Coindesk)

• “Men discover community building and think it’s a network state”: A scathing, silly article on a group of San Francisco tech-working transplants, who are living off the Morgan L stop in Brooklyn. (Curbed)

  • Their goal, according to a now-deleted Substack post, is to “bring high-agency, emotionally intelligent New Yorkers within walking distance of one another” (gentrification DUPE) and to “combine the serendipity of a college campus, the co-creation of Burning Man, the agency of Silicon Valley, the vigor of a Midwestern high school track coach, [with] the culture of New York City.” 

• A closer look at the photographs of Corky Lee, a Chinese-American photographer, community organizer, and activist.

  •  “Rather than searching for a dubious authenticity, essence, or nationalism, Corky suggested that Asian American identity did not possess—and also did not need—any underlying reality beyond solidarity.” (n+1)

• The agoraphobic fantasy of tradlife (Dissent Magazine)

• Another high fashion anime collaboration just dropped: Jimmy Choo x Sailor Moon. The collection will be released on Valentine’s Day.

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