Sales people, and company owners, have a vested interest in pushing the narrative that the illusion is actually magic.

I believe that for a large number of applications the distinction between "knowing something" and "containing knowledge" doesn't really matter.

In 2010s Google I could type in a query, and it would redirect me to a human-written answer on something like StackOverflow with hopefully the right answer; in 2024 ChatGPT you can type in a query and it'll mash together some relevant human-written snippets into something which is hopefully coherent, relevant, and correct. Sure, it's "just" a Markov chain generator on steroids, but it's still giving you useful output.

I do agree that it is a bit worrying to what extent people are anthropomorphizing it, and treating it like something with an actual opinion or an unquestionable source-of-truth. The "I asked ChatGPT" comments should be treated the same as "I put it into Google and this was the first result": it's just line noise and doesn't add anything to the conversation. If you don't have anything to add yourself, why comment at all?

You're not alone

I feel the same way. It's frustrating feeling like I'm one of the few people that can see that the emperor has no clothes, and nice to see the occasional person like you that pushes back on this cargo cult fanaticism.

>It doesn't know anything. It doesn't understand anything. The illusion is very convincing, but it's just an illusion.

What would know and understand anything with this vague undefinable metric ? You ? How do i know you know and understand anything ? Can you prove that to me better than GPT can ?