Link: http://demandingchange.blogspot.com/2025/11/alphabetic-warning.html
From Systems Thinking for Demanding Change
In an interview with the BBC, Sundar Pichai, CEO of Alphabet, advises people to be cautious of what AI tells them, suggesting that AI should be combined with other tools such as, er, Google search (owned by Alphabet).
But if we shouldn’t blindly trust what AI tells us, the same advice surely applies to Google search as well. The question Can we trust Google? was raised on this blog over twenty years ago, and remains relevant today.
There are also important questions of context and perspective. People are increasingly aware that the results they get from generative AI is highly dependent on how the enquiry is worded, hence the new discipline of prompt engineering. But the same is also true of search engines, as I discussed with David McCoy back in 2008. In his comment below my blogpost, You don’t have to be smart to search here …, David recommended what he called speculative cunning.
One advantage of AI over search is that it offers much better levels of context-awareness (depending on the prompts). As I noted previously, standardized search systems … will give you exactly the same answer whether you are a schoolchild or a BBC researcher or an LSE postgraduate
. Someone at Google previously told the BBC about their Quest for the Perfect Search. But perhaps a perfectly personalized answer may have the effect of seducing the user into an unwarranted level of trust.
Mr Pichai acknowledges that there are ethical issues here, saying that Alphabet aims to be bold and responsible at the same time
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Faisal Islam and Rachel Clun, Don’t blindly trust what AI tells you, says Google’s Sundar Pichai (BBC, 18 November 2025)
Related posts Trusting Commons (March 2005), Context-Aware Services (January 2006), You don’t have to be smart to search here … (November 2008), The Force of Goole (April 2016)
