I treat this one with a grain of salt, because its very good at some things and utterly fucking useless at others.
I needed to know what company made the gearbox in a certain car. No matter what I searched in 3 different search engines all I could find was people wanting to sell me stuff for the gearbox or gearboxes. I spent an hour before I asked ChatGPT and it immediately spat out “The gearbox is a 4l80 produced by Aisin transmissions” which I then spent some time verifying. At the core if search engines hadnt been enshitified, ChatGPT would be nothing more than a novelty. But because they have, its a sometimes useful tool that anyone with half a brain verifies.
That’s the thing though. If someone has used chat gpt to find information and then spent the time to verify it independently, they rarely, if ever, start a sentence with “I asked chat gpt…”.
The ones that say that usually just stop at the first response they get from it. Even if what they say ends up being correct, you now know that they’re the kind of person that’ll blindly believe an LLM.
I think a big problem is the info is out there, but they are awful at search. They still think Google is good. In today’s world you need 3 different search engines and also asking folks in the fediverse helps a lot if my issues.
But people want to go to the orphan crushing machine bot to ask it questions, because its easier.
We never needed llm slop for this. We needed a non corporate greed driven search and educated populace (now THERES a good joke!!)
yes!! I was setting up Lyrion Music Server and I’m kind of an idiot, so when I had a specific question about that I asked a clunker. There’s very little documentation or discussion about it (weirdly, it’s awesome) so it was extremely helpful. But yeah for the most part I don’t use it.
I asked chat gpt…
I usually let this one slide. It’s the “I asked grok” folks i go full send on
I treat this one with a grain of salt, because its very good at some things and utterly fucking useless at others.
I needed to know what company made the gearbox in a certain car. No matter what I searched in 3 different search engines all I could find was people wanting to sell me stuff for the gearbox or gearboxes. I spent an hour before I asked ChatGPT and it immediately spat out “The gearbox is a 4l80 produced by Aisin transmissions” which I then spent some time verifying. At the core if search engines hadnt been enshitified, ChatGPT would be nothing more than a novelty. But because they have, its a sometimes useful tool that anyone with half a brain verifies.
If you treat it like gospel, yeah… your an idiot.
That’s the thing though. If someone has used chat gpt to find information and then spent the time to verify it independently, they rarely, if ever, start a sentence with “I asked chat gpt…”.
The ones that say that usually just stop at the first response they get from it. Even if what they say ends up being correct, you now know that they’re the kind of person that’ll blindly believe an LLM.
Ever thought of checking the factory service manual or prodemmand or all data? It’s not hard to find this sort of info…
I think a big problem is the info is out there, but they are awful at search. They still think Google is good. In today’s world you need 3 different search engines and also asking folks in the fediverse helps a lot if my issues.
But people want to go to the orphan crushing machine bot to ask it questions, because its easier.
We never needed llm slop for this. We needed a non corporate greed driven search and educated populace (now THERES a good joke!!)
yes!! I was setting up Lyrion Music Server and I’m kind of an idiot, so when I had a specific question about that I asked a clunker. There’s very little documentation or discussion about it (weirdly, it’s awesome) so it was extremely helpful. But yeah for the most part I don’t use it.