It seems strange to me to put this into a search engine. What is the relationship between these two web apps? I suspect Microsoft is trying to do anything imaginable to drive people to bing search for ad revenue, but this one seems a bit shoehorned.
Playing with stable diffusion on the other hand… who would search for “Stalin petting a llama” and what practical application would it have?
Instead, with good prompting, you can not request a "photo" which matches your exact desires... close enough to perfectly that your audience won't notice or won't care about the last 1% that is imperfect.
And like the early days of online music, not only will people relax and accept imperfections (bad aliasing, mediocre sound quality), they may even become so accustomed to it that they will someday intentionally inject similar imperfections into creations so those feel more "natural" (comfortable based on the audiences' experiences).
To me, the interesting differentiation is from thinking a search engine being something than indexes information or a product that provides solutions to peoples problems and needs with a single point of entry. (Like why people type URLs into google search)
We’ve had search engines return the weather, or calculate a sum, for some time. It seems an obvious evolution for it to create solutions for users given lay users are probably already typing what they want into search.
I share the concerns and optimisms. The concerns. Last week my dad was asking “why are all these businesses closed today?”
I typed “holidays today” into bing search bar (not the chat), and it gave me “Holidays in May.” I’m glad he wasn’t confused between similar-sounding medications, I wasn’t expecting bing to be creative on a question like that.
The optimism. Freakin, my search engine can create content that never existed before. That’s pretty cool. Our phones aren’t really “phones” anymore, as we have learned. This live prototyping rollout of search-based ML has a similar nature.
It's searching the latent space.