I actually find it quite disturbing how often an online discussion will at some point involve someone saying “well I went and checked this with grok/chatgpt/whatever” with apparently no idea that they’re just asking the lying machine to tell them lies.
I know search engines are becoming increasingly enshittified, but asking an “”“AI”“” questions seems like more effort than skimming Wikipedia or even digging through actual, published, academic papers to find answers. A lot of these chatbots give different answers to the same inputs, making them completely unreliable.
I don’t get it. Maybe I’m too boomer-brained or something.
I also don’t get it, they’re excellent drafting tools if you struggle with writers block like I do, but only if you have a thorough understanding of what you want to write already.
They’re also useful for semantic search that fills a gap google should’ve been doing for years but won’t because of capitalism. I.e. I needed a set of studio speakers that would fit in certain dimensions, and the slop machine parsed that query and shat out a list of like 8 that were a much easier starting point for a search than I could’ve gotten with a traditional search engine or whatever shitty general-purpose filters offered by a music supplier website, much less the secondary markets I wanted to source them from. And if any of them were made up that was immediately clear too.
What they’re terrible at is providing encyclopedic reference, which is what most people seem to be using them for? It’s mind-boggling.
I’m currently studying for honours, definitely not as much effort as digging through peer reviewed sources! But definitely a worse effort : results ratio because the results are fucking useless.
I actually find it quite disturbing how often an online discussion will at some point involve someone saying “well I went and checked this with grok/chatgpt/whatever” with apparently no idea that they’re just asking the lying machine to tell them lies.
I know search engines are becoming increasingly enshittified, but asking an “”“AI”“” questions seems like more effort than skimming Wikipedia or even digging through actual, published, academic papers to find answers. A lot of these chatbots give different answers to the same inputs, making them completely unreliable.
I don’t get it. Maybe I’m too boomer-brained or something.
I also don’t get it, they’re excellent drafting tools if you struggle with writers block like I do, but only if you have a thorough understanding of what you want to write already.
They’re also useful for semantic search that fills a gap google should’ve been doing for years but won’t because of capitalism. I.e. I needed a set of studio speakers that would fit in certain dimensions, and the slop machine parsed that query and shat out a list of like 8 that were a much easier starting point for a search than I could’ve gotten with a traditional search engine or whatever shitty general-purpose filters offered by a music supplier website, much less the secondary markets I wanted to source them from. And if any of them were made up that was immediately clear too.
What they’re terrible at is providing encyclopedic reference, which is what most people seem to be using them for? It’s mind-boggling.
I’m currently studying for honours, definitely not as much effort as digging through peer reviewed sources! But definitely a worse effort : results ratio because the results are fucking useless.