Bing, Bard, and Search Results

ByRichard Byrne

One of the most popular things that I wrote in March was this little piece about the Hello History AI app. It prompted a lot of people to email me with concerns about its accuracy.

The concerns that people expressed about Hello History were largely the same as the ones people have been sharing with me about ChatGPT and AI-assisted search tools. And those concerns remind me a lot of the arguments that teachers had about Wikipedia 15+ years ago.

Before going any further, if you haven’t seen the new version of Bing with ChatGPT enabled or Google’s new Bard AI, I have two demonstration videos for you to watch. This video demonstrates Bing with ChatGPT enabled. This video shows you how Bard works.

Context Matters

Just like when Wikipedia became prevalent in our lives, we need to remind and teach students to not take everything generated by search results at face value. To that end, here’s one of my favorite examples of using context clues to identify incorrect information in a Wikipedia article.

In my demonstrations of Bard and Bing there were opportunities to provide more context to evaluate and refine results. For example, the training plans that were initially generated didn’t take into account any event deadlines. When I provided a deadline, the results changed, but they didn’t change for the better. That provided an opportunity for me to weigh my prior knowledge against what the AI generated.

Before the Chat

For years I have made my students complete a simple pre-search checklist at the start of any research assignment. I’m working on developing a similar pre-chat checklist for students.

The goal of developing a pre-chat checklist is the same as it was when I created a pre-search checklist many years ago. That goal is to get students to account for their prior knowledge in formulating their queries and weigh their prior knowledge and context clues against what is generated by their queries.

I definitely don’t have all of the answers about AI and where it’s headed in schools, but I’m going to keep searching for those answers. I hope that you do the same.

Making & Teaching With Animated Explanations

If you’re looking for a new and fun classroom project, give animated explanations a try. I have a self-paced course in which you can learn all about it!