Author: Simon Coghlan, Senior Lecturer in Digital Ethics, Centre for AI and Digital Ethics, School of Computing and Information Systems, The University of Melbourne

Every day, users ask search engines millions of questions. The information we receive can shape our opinions and behaviour. We are often not aware of their influence, but internet search tools sort and rank web content when responding to our queries. This can certainly help us learn more things. But search tools can also return low-quality information and even misinformation. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have entered the search scene. While LLMs are not search engines, commercial web search engines have started to include LLM-based artificial intelligence (AI) features into their products. Microsoft’s Copilot and Google’s Overviews are examples of…