ChatGPT’s strength is that it’s new on the market, needs to build an audience, and therefore their UI and UX are lean, devoid of gaming.

Same as Google, up until 2008.

A lot more than I've ever paid to use the Google search engine.

Paid for service over ads is the new way forward.

Yesterday we asked it what “RF” inscribed in a crest on a government building meant (“République Française”). A few days ago we asked why an area was called Gobelins, and if that had any relationship to the modern goblins in fantasy. I asked how to ask for more bread at the table and it gave me a pretty long, fancy French sentence. I asked it to simplify the sentence and it did beautifully. You can ask Google translate to translate something, but chatgpt can give you multiple translations, and tell you the cultural nuances of all of them and teach you French grammar while it’s at it. “How do I say this? Why does it use suis in that sentence? Is that a weird thing to say to the wait staff at a restaurant? What is the protocol there?” Etc.

We’ve been using it constantly.

For example, if I ask what the best vacuum cleaner on the market is, I'd rather it not regurgitate bestvacuumreviews.net which is affiliate (not quality) driven

There’s three reasons…(1) ad revenue, (2) there’s a belief that the extended life stories confer copyright to recipes, which otherwise cannot be copyrighted and (3) everyone does it.

Source: I made SimplifyRecipe.com, which requires diving into the minutiae of recipe authors.

Otherwise, I agree that getting consistent results from GPT is super useful.

Or they work for a selection of cases but not others. Or they seem to work in a limited number of tests but aren’t truly doing the right thing. Or they do work but have a security flaw that makes your service vulnerable.

Coding solutions have tradeoffs and subtleties which go beyond “it did the thing right a couple of times when I ran it”. If that’s all it took to verify code is good, there wouldn’t be any bugs; you can test code a person writes too.

But contrast this with other types of information. If I ask ChatGPT "how hot is the surface of the sun?" and it answers "15 million degrees Fahrenheit", I really have no way to tell if it's right or wrong. As a result, I really don't find ChatGPT useful for these sorts of questions.

(The example answer is wrong according to https://www.space.com/17137-how-hot-is-the-sun.html, albeit in such a way that I could see potentially confusing an LLM.)

But the nice thing about ChatGPT is that you can give it more context than it is possible in a Google query, and you can ask follow-up questions.

They are still useful, you just have to make sure you understand what you are doing and read the relevant docs before you paste the code.

Things like "How do I delete a value from a dict" probably either works or it doesn't.

Then again, for that level of simple stuff, one can probably search a PDF cheat sheet just with their eyes faster than they can type the question for ChatGPT

On the surface it makes no sense to do this since it already gave you an answer. But that's not how LLMs work - they can simulate a variety of different "humans" depending on the prompt and presenting a different prompt persona (security researcher, code reviewer that focuses on edge cases, etc) yields a different quality of response.

And in general I find it’s more accurate and far more concise than anything that’s going to show up in a Google search.

I mean, there’s no way I’m taking what it says at face value or copy / pasting code from its response, but that goes for stack overflow, or any other source too. (maybe sans official docs)

I think the internet is going to start to stratify into paid and "free" tiers going forward, and honestly it's about goddamned time.

I have no way to verify that.

What I care about is a search engine that's trying its hardest to serve me answers to my searches, rather than feeding me ads.

AI tools today are great for the same reason Google was great in its first few years of existence: they want to attract users and sell this awesome new product. But this will quickly change.

The ad and investor-fueled enshittification will inevitably also come to popular AI tools, but in even more sinister ways than web search results. Forget banners and traditional ad campaigns. Users will start seeing subtle product placements in the responses, and certain brands placed higher than others, all embedded in the friendly conversational tone they're used to, to make them even more susceptible to manipulation. Thanks to the sea of private data users are willing to share with their "personal" AI assistant, the responses will be perfectly fine-tuned so that ads are targeted at them _personally_. Advertisers will no longer need to target broad cohorts who may or may not be interested in their brand. They will be able to reach _exactly_ people who are most likely to make a purchase, especially if the ad is delivered at _exactly_ the right moment when the person is most vulnerable.

The only way to avoid this is to use open source and self-hosted AI tools, but the vast majority of people will use whatever service is popular and "free", same as today.

For basic stuff it is much faster than Google. But if it requires minimum thinking it still faster doing myself.

The other day I was lazy to find a generic scraper I have so I could save a reference manual. I know it is just like 50 lines of code and if you are smart you could do it async. I tried with ChatGPT and it didn't work at all. Many silly mistakes hidden between comments that looked reasonable

It does a good job of building commands for common tools.

Spending time on the page should actually be a great proxy for usefulness on recipe websites. If it's a long page of introduction and anecdotes, maybe it took me three minutes instead of one to reject it as unpromising. If it's the recipe I actually used, however, that tab is going to be open for the next thirty minutes or more.

I’ve seen “they’re long so there’s more space for ads” and “they’re long so you spend more time there so it doesn’t get penalised by google”, and to me those are pretty closely related.

It's a situation where Google doesn't benefit much more from it being the actual answer, and the site doesn't either.

In the long run it could have an impact on the user perception, that could be nullified by the page still staying ranked higher than the competiting pages and the user finding nowhere else better.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Penguin

Actually you're probably getting someone's list of 10 best films that got copied to 1000 more sites and ended up training ChatGPT...

1. Build a skill set to navigate millions of pages of fluff SEO garbage and gain intuition of which sites are more likely to be credibility based on something akin to a internet dosing rod.

2. Build skill set to evaluate if a statement or claim is factually true. i.e. ChatGPT just told me something, how likely is it to be true.

I know which skill set I would rather develop, obviously #2, as it's transferable to nearly every intellectual venture a human would consider, while #1 is not.

Also, I feel the people that play the FUD campaign on GPT hallucinations just haven't used it much. The average quality of GPT answers, at least in programming, is far above the average hit on google, and the fact that I can interact with the answer and shape it to go in any direction I want or mix it match it with nearly any other concept on the spot, it's light years more valuable than the average google search. At this point, I would guess I only resort to google 10% of what I used to, and it's normally to attempt to find a specific website that has specific information I remember accessing before that I want to look up again.

Probably because there would be barely anything left in the results once ads and spam are removed.