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Comment by phanimahesh | Hacker News Reader

I'm somehat worried about the incidental harm caused by people relying on GPT's word chain hallucinations as facts for something critical.

Most laypersons don't understand that GPT is not a factual search engine. I'm increasingly seeing people who should know better also forget this now and then.

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the problem is that the quality of data on the web is such you can't really trust what you get from google either, so you need to go back to the pre-google days of using specialized search engines, or accept that some of what you get back is likely polluted and you don't have the resources to verify everything.

Nail on the head.

The web is a swamp of hot garbage, in large part thanks to Google SEO incentives.

If Google hadn't poisoned the well, and if searching pulled up good content instead of ads designed to look like search results, and search results that link to web pages that take 5 screenfuls to convey one sentence of information, they wouldn't be looking down the barrel at an existential threat.

with google, at least you could know where and who that piece of information is written..

with gpt, you got nothing but the same convincing tone.

You can ask it to provide links to primary sources as part of your prompt. This helps quite a bit with this problem.

When I try this I seem to get back either non-existent URLs, or links to real documents that don't actually contain what it implies they contain.

It is also important to note that GPT is _not_ useless as a search engine.

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