alt Hacker NewsFortunately these days I have a very patient interlocutor named ChatGPT blessed with an infinite tolerance for half-baked questions and a soothing lack of judgmentality.
I know it’s popular to say AI is overhyped or not actually useful, but I think one area where it’s unquestionably a massive improvement is in asking stupid questions. I ask ChatGPT so many questions that I’ve started looking for ways to automatically send me a daily summary of questions and answers, to add to Anki.
I used to post a lot of these types of questions on subreddits that are Ask-related. Ask Philosophy and Ask Historians, for example. Unfortunately the mod teams for many subreddits like this have gone overboard, deleting anything that doesn’t fit their specific idiosyncratic rules.
Needless to say I have almost entirely stopped asking questions on Reddit.
It would be interesting to compare a person trained in an area, asking questions as a student, with answers from LLMs vs an average set of people. Of course that would require scientific funding and someone experienced in the field to set it up.