With web searches the reputation of sources can at least be discriminated. (Which seems to even help GPT-4 ?)

To be fair, this is also illogical, at least in a literal sense. It’s the Appeal to Authority fallacy. The reputation of the speaker doesn’t necessarily confirm or deny an assertion they make.

Granted, most people tend to use some combination of both logic and heuristics in practice to determine their own understanding of the truth, perceived reputation being a fairly common one.

> To be fair, this is also illogical, at least in a literal sense

Mostly in the same sense as arguments from induction are "illogical". Appeal to authority is essentially an inductive argument, and those are just as logical. Of course, they deal in probabilities rather than certainty, unlike deduction, but that doesn't make them illogical.

It does make it illogical, in the same way that “dealing in probabilities” makes many other things illogical. Like, for example, crime statistics.

All of physics, and science in general, is based on arguments from induction. If you want to call that illogical too, then, fair enough.

Sure, but so is listening to doctors(' websites). That's why there's a LOT of checks and balances around who gets to claim to be a doctor !

Not quite. For people outside of tech they can hear "AI" and think it must be right. And how great GPT is so it must be right. There are no other opinions.

Distilled down, classic search is many results; gpt is one result.

Someone in tech debated me on the term fossil fuel.

He said that oil is renewable because the platonic plates make oil and not some million old waiting based chemical process.

When people ignore everything and also ignore logic (why do oil wells disappear after getting the oil out) it really doesn't matter were they read it

Platonic plates?

Yes, the Form of a slightly concave disc for your dinner. Your kitchen cabinets contain only imperfect reflections of the True Plate.

Tectonic plates.

Not sure why I wrote platonic

Funny you mention this. There was a time (in my living memory), where people regarded whatever in print as proof of correctness. Newspapers had value then.

It's even worse than that imho, unscrupulous sellers will go into keyword planner in google ads and create content to sell supplements and find "under-served" niches.

It's actively adversarial.