Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a significant epistemological problem: how do you know that what it's telling you is true? For things that you yourself can verify easily, this isn't too much of a problem. It gives you some boost tips, you see whether the program works or not. But as you come to rely on it, and it matters whether the answers are correct in important ways, what validation/verification/QA steps can you apply to ensure that you…
I use it like Wikipedia: a good jumping off point. Often times I will forget an exact thing I wish to find online so I will ask ChatGPT to list multiple things that could be what I just described. I then take this list to my search engine du jour.
Before that, there was a lot of concern about blogs when they were the hot new thing. Here’s a New York Times article[1] from that period discussing the blogging controversy:
> There are two obvious differences between bloggers and the traditional press: unlike bloggers, professional journalists have a) editors and b) the need to maintain a professional reputation so that sources will continue to talk to them. I've been a journalist for more than a decade, and on two occasions I asked acquaintances whether I could print information that they had told me in social situations. Both times, they made clear that if I published they would never speak to me again. Without a reputation for trustworthiness, neither friendship nor journalism can be sustained over time.
The concerns weren’t incorrect - Wikipedia or Blogs are often unreliable. But the concerns overlooked how useful these things could be despite their problems.
As an aside, it's interesting to see comments here bring up the potential unreliability of ChatGPT - and then say that people should go read Wikipedia instead.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2004/12/19/magazine/your-blog-or-min...