Why would most people use them? What do they offer other than dubious facts that they have to check 95% of the time to not get screwed by something important that it got wrong and in the past would have taken a 5 second google search before the top 50 results became a copy-pasted AI answer? AI may be good for coding, but it is still crap for many generalized topics beyond a 5th grader's questions. The answers are way…
We have a sailboat and it has a turbo diesel engine, which is unusual (for a sailboat). Purely mechanical and I understand small diesel engines pretty well. But when we had loss of power and a change in exhaust and it could have been about 4 different things. Based on an array symptoms ChatGPT worked through a few tests for me to do and narrowed it down. It had a consistent and good methodology for working through this.
I am planning a large solar array for our boat. It is challenging because it is a 48v system and that has certain requirements. We have to use an array of smaller panels wired together in groups to get the right voltages. I also have partial shading issues to work out. But there are a lot of other variables too that have to be accounted for. It worked through all this well and came up with a great plan, pointing out things that were not hard to verify but things I did not initially think of. I am pretty knowledgeable about electrical stuff as well and it did not get anything wrong.
Another example is I want to come up with a way to identify a user for a system based on 5 things they could remember. Not facts, things. But how do you make a system that someone can remember (without writing down) 5 things, 5 years from now. ChatGPT came up with a good idea using memory chains that would make it easier for a person to remember.
All of these were insightful conversations that I had with ChatGPT Sol medium effort.
I also find that for answering questions that require some thinking (like how does xyz work) my default is becoming ChatGPT vs Google more and more.