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Comment by dmw_ng | Hacker News Reader

There is some very natural split regarding what I'll send to ChatGPT vs. what goes to Google. For example "six nations fixtures" obviously Google, but anything of depth or where recency is irrelevant goes the other direction. Asked it a few Linux questions today, how to interpret the title of a particular FRED chart, and a ton more sessions that Firefox history somehow didn't manage to correctly track the title for. I vastly prefer ChatGPT's interaction format compared to the equivalent random keyword spelunking session on Google.

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Same, until I realized that about 60% of the information it gives me is either subtly wrong or 100% factually incorrect. Yet it's so, so confident.

And in that way its actually more overall correct than the most knowledgeable person on earth. With google you also get fed some very dangerously wrong info (recent example masks) but you think its correct. With ChatGPT you have to actually use your critical thinking skills and get to the truth which in my opinion a huge advancement over google.

Not really, with google you get multiple sources at a glance. Sure, they can still be wrong, but some critical thinking + multiple sources = more likely to be correct than relying on a single unreliable source.

No, the crucial thing is that a good human will tell you if they don't know something, or if they are simply unsure.

It's adorable seeing this kind of critique in the context of HN, I wonder how many folk knew my heavily upvoted comment above ("For 10 billion+ ...") was from someone who has only been looking at this stuff for a few weeks. ChatGPT is no better or worse than any consultant I've ever met (including myself), or most of the commenters you find here every single day.

It's adorable that you think people assume HN comments are factually correct. I read everything here with extreme skepticism, because I know this is all coming from flawed humans. An computer system giving authoritative text and insisting it is 100% correct is a different story.

Every bit of text from a computer system also comes from flawed humans.

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