We’re in the early days of generative AI tools. They might also be the best days, says one AI founder.
By day, Lily Clifford is the CEO and founder of Rime Labs. The startup creates the voice on the other end of the line when you call to order from restaurants like Domino’s or Wingstop. Rime trains AI models to create voices with specific regional accents, tones, and other elements that make them easier to converse with.
Clifford also uses AI in her daily life, especially in lieu of search engines, she told Business Insider.
Instead of pulling up a search engine when she has a question, Clifford usually turns to generative AI chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini.
She said the experience reminds her of using Google or other search engines in the late 1990s and early 2000s. That’s when she thinks the user experience was at its prime.
“My hot take here is these applications might be the best that they ever will be,” she said.
Search engines used to be simpler, Clifford said. There were far fewer ads and sponsored results. And optimizing webpages to get more clicks — a practice known as SEO — was in its infancy.
Those developments spawned new businesses and became features of the modern internet. But Clifford said search results have also gotten worse for users. It’s common to see multiple sponsored results above more relevant ones in a search, for instance.
AI chatbots, meanwhile, haven’t gone through the same evolution — yet.
Companies and individuals are still experimenting with using generative AI for lots of tasks, from writing emails to creating images for advertising campaigns.
Many people, like Clifford, use AI as a replacement for search engines.
Ask AI a question, and it will often give you an answer in just a few sentences. For some, that’s more appealing than clicking through several results from a search engine until you find the information that you’re looking for.
AI search results can also give users contradictory or incorrect information, though, creating a potential downside to the quick-and-easy answers.
Still, Clifford noticed the user experience gap between the chatbots and search engines during a recent trip to Milan, she said. While there, she used an AI chatbot to look for a local place to buy a silk blouse. The chatbot pointed her toward a local seamstress who sold custom blouses through Instagram.
“It wasn’t like ‘Go to Forever 21,’ which is probably what would’ve happened if I typed it into Google,” she said. “It was totally wild and fun to use.”
But, Clifford thinks it’s a matter of time before AI chatbots go the way of the search engines before them.
Some companies with big investments in generative AI search tools are taking steps in that direction.
Last month, Google said it would expand its use of ads in some of the AI Overviews that appear at the top of its search results, for example.
And some marketing experts now offer help with “answer engine optimization,” or AEO.
These practices could make using generative AI for search more complex for users over time, Clifford said.
“More and more people pile in and try to do things with it, and then that necessarily makes it complicated,” she said.