Bing: “I will not harm you unless you harm me first”

(Boring predictions: Microsoft quietly integrates some of the better language generation features into Word with a lot of rails in place, replaces ChatGPT answers with Alexa-style bot on rails answers for common questions in its chat interfaces but most people default to using search for search and Word for content generation, and creates ClippyGPT which is more amusing than useful just like its ancestor. And Google's search is threatened more by GPT spam than people using chatbots. Not sure people who hurt themselves following GPT instructions will have much more success in litigation than people who hurt themselves following other random website instructions, but I can see the lawyers getting big disclaimers ready just in case)

"Google queries suck these days", yeah they suck because the internet is full of garbage. Adding a slicker interface to it won't change that, and building one that's prone to hallucinating on top of an internet full of "psuedo-hallucinations" is an even worse idea.

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ChatGPT's awe inspiring uses are in the category of "style transfer for knowledge". That's not asking ChatGPT to be a glorified search engine, but instead deriving novel content from the combination of hard information you provide, and soft direction that would be impossible for a search engine.

Stuff like describing a product you're building and then generating novel user stories. Then applying concepts like emotion "What 3 things my product annoy John" "How would Cara feel if the product replaced X with Y". In cases like that hallucinations are enabling a completely novel way of interacting with a computer. "John" doesn't exist, the product doesn't exist, but ChatGPT can model extremely authoritative statements about both while readily integrating whatever guardrails you want: "Imagine John actually doesn't mind #2, what's another thing about it that he and Cara might dislike based on their individual usecases"

Or more specifically to HN, providing code you already have and trying to shake out insights. The other day I had a late night and tried out a test: I intentionally wrote a feature in a childishly verbose way, then used ChatGPT to scale up and down on terseness. I can Google "how to shorten my code", but only something like ChatGPT could take actual hard code and scale it up or down readily like that. "Make this as short as possible", "Extract the code that does Y into a class for testability", "Make it slightly longer", "How can function X be more readable". 30 seconds and it had exactly what I would have written if I had spent 10 more minutes working on the architecture of that code

To me the current approach people are taking to ChatGPT and search feels like the definition of trying to hammer a nail with a wrench. Sure it might do a half acceptable job, but it's not going to show you what the wrench can do.