What are you talking about? I don’t verify anything that ChatGPT gives me.

in my use case, the hallucinations are a good thing. I write fiction, in a fictional setting that will probably never actually become a book. If i like what gpt makes up, I might keep it.

Usually, I'll have a conversation going into detail about a subject, this is me explaining the subject to gpt, then having gpt summarize everything it learned about the subject. I then plug that summary into my wiki of lore that nobody will ever see. Then move on to the next subject. Also gpt can identify potential connections between subjects that I didn't think about, and wouldn't have if it didn't hallucinate them.

All tools get misused.

Eh I just let it write my bash scripts. A bit of trial and error with ChatGPT beats having to read the ffmpeg or imagemagick docs.

You have to understand it well enough to know what stuff you can rely on. On the other hand nowadays there are often sources there, so it's easy to check.

In another thread, I was curious about the probability of reaching the age of 60 while living in the US.

Google gave me an assortment of links to people asking similar questions on Quora, and to some generic actuarial data, and to some totally unrelated bullshit.

ChatGPT gave me a multi-paragraph response referencing its data sources and providing both a general life expectancy and a specific answer broken out by gender. I asked ChatGPT how it reached this answer, and it proceeded to show its work. If I wanted to verify the work myself, ChatGPT gave me source material to cross-check and the calculations it used to find the answer. Google didn't even come close to answering the question, much less producing the data it used to reach the answer.

I'm as big an AI skeptic as anyone, but it can't be denied that generic search engines have degraded significantly. I feel like I'm using Alta Vista in the 90s whenever I query Google in the modern day. The AI systems do a marginally better job than old search engines were doing five years ago, before enshittification hit with full force.

It sucks that AI is better, but it IS better.

I usually tell it "using only information found on applicationwebsite.com " that works pretty well at least to get me in the ballpark to find the answer I'm looking for.

Because realistically, that time is zero.

bold of u to assume there are docs