Why would you waste tokens on that? Just do a google search?

In their defence, google searching anything about plants these days leads to awful results. It’s saturated with slop. A response from an LLM might be slightly more reasoned and targeted. It’s hard to tell. This is a category of knowledge that’s being destroyed by people gaming google and dumping huge amounts of bad LLM and image generation onto the web.

This is also true for pretty much any other category of search that you do as a layman. Specific, targeted queries for official documentation or research are fine, but if you look up basic information about cars, health, or basic computer troubleshooting a massive portion of the results are AI-generated.

If I'm going to be getting AI-generated results, I'd rather read the output of a model that has all the context of my specific situation than slop generated in bulk with a cheap model from six months ago.

I envision a <model> html tag for SEO so that the publisher can make false claims of authorship.

Is a google search actually easier than asking a model?