It’s much worse. A webpage that is presented as the result of a user input has a certain context, an embedded assumption/understanding that an inappropriate result could be the result of a malformed query. Put another way: Google is saying “here is what I found on the web.” ChatGPT is saying “this is the answer to your question” and refuses to cite any but the vaguest of sources, like a solar calculator, not even a particular one.

The danger is in the framing.

ChatGPT is insanely good at a lot of things, but everything that requires understanding higher level of concepts it fails miserably at. The "parts and chapters" question is the best example - no human (probably not even the author and editor) would know the answer, but any human would know that it could get the answer by opening the index and counting the individual chapters.

ChatGPT can't do either. It can't open the book and ingest it, it can't parse the context from a book's index that a human could see by their bare eye (e.g. indents for chapters), it can't answer the question even if it got trained using the book and the index because the context of the index, page numbers and other metadata is completely lost to it and even if you expanded the training program to specifically take notice of that for books it would still likely be unable to answer the question because it would get lost in the (effective) compression during training.

the chatgpt api also returns a probability of how right it thinks it is, it really is a shame that value isn't displayed in the web version