alt Hacker NewsIt's astounding to me that people just like... always trust whatever the LLM says.
I have some friends who use ChatGPT for everything. From doing work to asking simple questions. One of my friends wanted a bio on a certain musician and asked ChatGPT. It's a little frightening he couldn't, you know, read the Wikipedia page of this musician, where all of the same information is and there are sources for this material.
My mom said she used ChatGPT to make a "capsule wardrobe" for her. I'm thinking to myself (I did not say this to her)... you can't just like look at your clothes and get rid of ones you don't wear? Why does a computer need to make this simple decision?
I'm really not sure LLMs should ever be used as a learning aid. I have never seen a reason to use them over, you know, searching something online. Or thinking of your own creative story. If someone can make a solid use case as to why LLMs are useful I would like to hear.
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I agree, at first I thought gpt would be used by tech savvy folk, but now it is clear that it’s becoming a crutch. My friend couldn’t respond to an email without it.
> One of my friends wanted a bio on a certain musician and asked ChatGPT.
I use ChatGPT (or Gemini) instead of web searches. You can blame the content and link farms that are top of the search results, and the search engines focusing on advertising instead of search, because we're the product.
Why your friend doesn't know about wikipedia is another matter, if i wanted a generic info page about some topic i'd go directly there. But if i wanted to know if Bob Geldof's hair is blue, I might ask a LLM instead of reading the whole wikipedia page.
I also ask LLMs for introductory info about programming topics i don't know about, because i don't want to go to google and end up on w3schools, geeksforgeeks and crap like that.
I don't really trust LLMs for advanced programming topics, you know, what people pay me for. But they're fine for giving me a function signature or even a small example.
Regarding your mom’s clothes: she wasn’t asking the machine to give advice she couldn’t think of on her own, she was seeking external validation and permission to purge and override the hoarder urge of her personality.
This is like when CEOs hire outside consulting firms to do layoffs for them. Pinning the pain of loss on some scapegoat makes it more bearable.