As for how you know it's accurate, you don't really have to know it's accurate most of the time, because if you're using it to try to learn something new it's probably going to become apparent quickly enough. Nobody is reading something and then going "Welp, now I'm done learning."

As a software example, you can ask it about implementing the Fourier transform. If it says something wrong, you'll find out.

The question then becomes how often it is inaccurate and how badly. But in that regard, as long as you don't treat it as an all-knowing oracle, it's at least as useful as having a friend that knows a lot of stuff you want to learn.

people keep saying this, but it isn't true. if you ignore sites like this one and reddit there are plenty of authoritative articles and explanations about things with provenance. and if they are wrong they'll update their information.

Well, then we don't need to argue this since the problem will elegantly solve itself if that's true.

I disagree though. For a lot of things it feels like I can get much better answers than Google, especially when it comes to somewhat conceptual questions.

(Also, I don't use news aggregator comments to learn things unless it's the only possible source. But if you think every blog post or YouTube video that got things wrong has a detailed errata, you'd be sorely wrong. It's so uncommon on YouTube that the practice is usually commended when noticed.)

I disagree though. For a lot of things it feels like I can get much better answers than Google, especially when it comes to somewhat conceptual questions.

(Also, I don't use news aggregator comments to learn things unless it's the only possible source. But if you think every blog post or YouTube video that got things wrong has a detailed errata, you'd be sorely wrong. It's so uncommon on YouTube that the practice is usually commended when noticed.)

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I never said ChatGPT is useless, lol. it's truly amazing how people can be so bad at reading comprehension yet praise AI bots in the same post.

But in all seriousness, I just simply didn't have much to go off of, and extrapolated based on context in the thread. You could always elaborate on what your opinions are.

For instance I asked it about space time metrics, and I learned about the varying types and in what circumstances each are used. Ask it about their mathematical properties and it gives a succinct explanation contrasting the different approaches. Certainly you can see the value now of conversational style pedagogy.

Think of it like learning about things from mates at the bar. In the thick of it there may be bits of inaccuracy, but you'll certainly know more about a topic than before. Then you can verify bits of things later in papers or books, etc.