Anybody remember how we used to learn new words and build our vocabulary? Perhaps it went something like:

"What does this word mean"?

"Look it up in the dictionary"

"Why can't you just tell me??"

I remember the hassle of looking things up in a paper dictionary. Over the long term, it massively helped improve my ability to not just recall a simple definition, but also learn new words, as they were adjacent to what I was looking for.

It's effectively this hassle ChatGPT and Bard are 'solving'. Instead of a group of links that you'd personally evaluate and mentally rank in terms of usefulness (thereby building your own bullshit detector over time), you will now have a chatbot AIsplaining things to you like you were a 12-year old, regardless of the topic's complexity.

I'll admit I was concerned about about Grammarly.com ruining people's ability to learn to write. That pales in comparison to an opaque search engine promising to give you the keys to all of human knowledge.