Information Foraging with Generative AI: A Study of 3 Chatbots

Summary: In a study of ChatGPT, Bard, and Bing Chat, users found these tools helpful and trustworthy. They expected these AI chatbots to aggregate information in a concise and specific manner, while fully considering contextual cues.

Generative-AI bots like ChatGPT , Bing, and Bard have reduced the amount of work required for users to find and gather information. Instead of doing all the work of information foraging (which involves looking through the many web pages available to them and picking up bits of information as they go), people can now use a bot to provide them with a precise, often concise answer.

However, these chatbots are currently far from perfect: people have a difficult time articulating their prompts and getting the output they desire . In addition, the bot can sometimes “forget” the context and provide broad or irrelevant answers, making tasking completion tedious.

To understand how users take advantage of these tools, their attitudes towards them, and their usage patterns, we ran a diary study following AI chatbot users over a period of 2 weeks . In this article, we report on some general findings from this study.