When Alba Pérez, 19, decided to take a getaway this summer, she turned to ChatGPT to plan and organize her trip. “First, I informed him of the trips I had taken before so that he would have them as a reference and then I added information about the type of getaway I wanted and the time of year, ‘the trip will be in June, and I am looking for a destination in Europe,’ with good weather, a city with the sea and nightlife, a quiet place that is not too crowded.’” With all this information, the chat recommended Croatia, “specifically Split, since Dubrovnik is more saturated. And the truth is, she got it very right! ”She adds.
ChatGPT is known for being a very useful virtual assistant in the workplace. Professionals use it to write emails or outline reports, but younger people, in addition to using it for their academic work, are beginning to use it as a complement to search engines.
“Then I asked him what places to visit and what activities to do, and based on the instructions I had given him at the beginning, he recommended Plitvice, Krka Falls, and visiting the islands of Brac and Hvar. Much better than the typical Google web pages with the ‘6 places you can’t miss if you go to…’, where you always find the same places, nothing personalized according to your tastes,” adds Pérez.
ChatGPT has become an ally – a ‘buddy’, some say – of many young people who use it to search for recipes, plan weekly menus, compare products and prices before making a purchase, get recommendations for movies, books and music , organize and detail trips, ask for advice in your daily life, and, of course, make summaries and papers for the university.
“I use it as a personal diary,” says Magí Arbos, 21 years old. “I review at the end of the day the decisions I’ve made and how I felt about them, and with the help of the chat I can better plan my goals for the next day and reflect on my own reactions. This way I trust the decisions I make a little more,” she adds.
“I ask him random questions every day based on issues that I ask myself throughout the day to make small decisions, he is like another colleague,” explains Carla Royuela, 19 years old. What questions to ask on a first date, how to answer the most typical questions in a job interview or what results to expect from a dermatological treatment are some of the questions raised by these young people, who do not hesitate to use ChatGPT to search for food recipes and plan their meals. weekly menus in a nutritionally balanced way.
The rise of ChatGPT as a discovery tool is part of a broader transformation in digital search. While Google remains the dominant search engine in the world, people turn to different platforms depending on their needs: Tik Tok for visual recommendations of restaurants and local plans, Instagram to stay up to date with trends, Vinted to spot them, and Google Maps to read recommendations before entering a food establishment or clothing store. As digital applications become more specialized, users fragment their searches based on their interests.
Asked if conversational AI will reshape the way we search for information on the Internet, Google CEO Sundar Pichai said in an interview with CNBC last February that the new technology could provide an opportunity to advance the search market. , but argued that Google has a competitive advantage in combining artificial intelligence with traditional searches.
In any case, younger users have begun to question its credibility, saturated by sponsored content and low-quality web pages focused only on web positioning. Generative artificial intelligence chatbots, however, are more attractive to them because they allow them to ask a machine, instead of entering keywords into a search engine, and offer more personalized and precise results.
“I really like how Audrey Hepburn acts in classic films like ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ and ‘The Apartment,’ so I give her these references so she can recommend other films that I might like,” explains Pérez. “And he’s right: that’s how I got to ‘Sabrina’. I also use it to find new books and music that I might like.”
“When buying, I introduce the references of different items and ask them to compare them based on my needs to make a purchase that is as informed as possible, and less impulsive,” says Arbos. “I have used it with technological products such as headphones or sports shoes such as climbing shoes.”
Alerted by the advance of generative artificial intelligence chatbots, Google, which generates more than 150 billion dollars a year in search ads and does not want to lose its dominant position, has made inroads into the conversational chatbot market with Gemini, its most popular AI language model similar to ChatGPT. In addition to showing some answers generated by generative artificial intelligence in your searches.
Even so, in the aforementioned interview with the CEO of Google, Sundar Pichai, he predicts a great future for digital search as a discovery tool, although he does not hide that this is a moment of “change”, a turning point in the history of the internet
For its part, OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT widely supported by Microsoft, has been developing a web search product that would lead to more direct competition with Google, according to the specialized media The Information.
“Doing searches in Chat GPT is more enjoyable, it is as if you were talking to someone,” says Royuela, who also highlights other possibilities of generative artificial intelligence: “it serves to obtain smooth images, that is, without any overwritten text or previous element , and to structure texts.” She uses it that way in her job as an assistant at a modeling agency in Barcelona.
“It works for making summaries,” says 19-year-old Marina Montejano, adding a new use to conversational chatbots. “However, Perplexity is better at ‘doing’ the job because it provides up-to-date links and data. From there, one can continue investigating and contrasting, accessing the links and seeing if they are reliable sources. Related questions also help me a lot because they are very useful to focus and structure the work when you don’t even know where to start,” she adds.
“Also, Perplexity allows you to enter URLs and crawls them, while Chat GPT does not. Chat GPT is quite limited for jobs.”
Another use related to studies is to extract key concepts from a text. “From the notes I take in class, I ask you to detect the key concepts and that is what I study for the exam,” explains Pérez, who insists on the personalization and precision of ChatGPT and similar tools as differentiating elements with added value. with respect to lifelong searchers.
Only time will tell if we will continue searching with keywords or asking questions.
