The Atlantic – The company thinks it’s an innovator. In fact, it’s an imitator—and not the best one, either. By Cory Doctorow. “Microsoft is making a desperate play. Having spent billions on a search engine that no one uses, the company has sunk billions more into equipping it with the chatbot technology ChatGPT, on the theory that answering queries with automatically generated, falsehood-strewn paragraphs rather than links to webpages will be what finally persuades users to switch from Google Search. Microsoft’s move is understandable: It has tried everything to make Bing a thing, and failed. Harder to understand is why Google is copying Microsoft, with a plan to cram chatbots into every corner of the Googleverse. To explain why Google has been spooked into doing something so drastic and improbable, we need to consider the company’s history, which has been characterized by similar follies…”