For quick reference, sometimes it’s pretty good! The problem is that obviously you can’t dedicate a lot of compute or additional tools for checking those answers so most of it can’t really be trusted.
The sometimes convenience comes alongside ejecting society from the previous system of figuring out what is true and false.
That was a system that was already failing, but we may have gotten on top of. Now we have one that is simply alien and inimical to any human scale solutions to staying ahead of it.
Generation capacity simply outstrips verification capacity, and with search summaries taking over links to the actual sites, the funding/incentives to run sites and publish content is removed.
The curtain call of the era of the open internet, and the opening act of the LLM mediated web, isn’t a show I am excited to have front row seats to.
And yet they is not how it is used, and is trusted beyond sanity.