6 ms·

I know I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but I think one of the most underrated advantages of ChatGPT is simply that it says everything in exactly the sam

by johnfn 3y ago

I know I'm beating a dead horse at this point, but I think one of the most underrated advantages of ChatGPT is simply that it says everything in exactly the same tone and style. When I google for things, who knows what page I'm going to land on. It could be full of ads. It could have tons of content I have to parse before I get to what I care about, as said in OP. It could be written clunkily, in a way that's hard to parse, or it could be littered with spelling mistakes. It could be overly verbose, or explain things that I don't need to know. All this creates high variance in the actual time it takes to parse out what I need. When I ask ChatGPT it'll always give me the answer in a few paragraphs, and it's always written in the exact same way. What a boon! > How is this the number one link on Google? It's the number one link on Google because one proxy Google has to know if you got a result is that you lingered on the page for a long time. This is also, tangentially, why cooking recipe websites are so long. If you bounce immediately off a website, Google thinks that means that you didn't find it to be useful. ChatGPT does not have this problem.

Maxion 3y ago
Especially for these type of simple syntax questions that autocomplete or copilot isn’t getting. It’s so so quick to ask ChatGPT for the answer, rather than finding the documentation for the thing you’re looking for and parsing it.
eastbound 3y ago
Can’t wait until they (actually) monetize ChatGPT and maximize the time spent on the website, like Google. Can’t wait until ChatGPT says that, when their grandma went to school, they too needed to mentally add 26 + 13, and the teacher would always frown on pupils when they gave the answer 31. ChatGPT’s strength is that it’s new on the market, needs to build an audience, and therefore their UI and UX are lean, devoid of gaming. Same as Google, up until 2008.
- johnfn 3y ago
  I'm not convinced this is the case. Unlike Google, ChatGPT has clear monetization channels which are not advertising, like ChatGPT+, which is already doing very well, and it's easy to imagine further channels which allow access to specialized models. Additionally, unlike Google, you can only really get away with making your service crappy when you have such a strong moat that it's still significantly better than the competition. The only moat OpenAI has is its model, which is proving a lot easier to replicate than Google circa 2008's moat.
  - add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
    Cable TV has a clear monetization channel, surely there are no ads there.
- upmostly 3y ago
  They have. We pay $20 per month to get priority access. A lot more than I've ever paid to use the Google search engine. Paid for service over ads is the new way forward.
  - krageon 3y ago
    Ads and shit doesn't exist because there isn't a clear way to extract value. They exist because the folks that make decisions love ads and shit. You will end up paying a subscription for a bad product with few alternatives, just like most folks end up using Google now and pay with all their data. There simply isn't a good search engine, Google murdered all the real competition and what was left is mediocre.
penjelly 3y ago
even the fact that you always go to that same window, with the same format and interface lowers cognitive load imo. Of course chatgpt hasnt been a magic bullet for me yet, but it definitely eases the pain of developing things outside your usual perview
- josephg 3y ago
  I’m travelling in France at the moment and chatgpt is an absolutely incredible tour guide. Yesterday we asked it what “RF” inscribed in a crest on a government building meant (“République Française”). A few days ago we asked why an area was called Gobelins, and if that had any relationship to the modern goblins in fantasy. I asked how to ask for more bread at the table and it gave me a pretty long, fancy French sentence. I asked it to simplify the sentence and it did beautifully. You can ask Google translate to translate something, but chatgpt can give you multiple translations, and tell you the cultural nuances of all of them and teach you French grammar while it’s at it. “How do I say this? Why does it use suis in that sentence? Is that a weird thing to say to the wait staff at a restaurant? What is the protocol there?” Etc. We’ve been using it constantly.
radres 3y ago
Definitely the fact that I am not going to deal with ads when I am looking for something is a gamechanger.
- KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
  I do wonder: does / how does chatGPT differentiate between ad-driven content and regular content? For example, if I ask what the best vacuum cleaner on the market is, I'd rather it not regurgitate bestvacuumreviews.net which is affiliate (not quality) driven
iambateman 3y ago
It used to be why Recipe websites were so long, but that’s no longer the case. There’s three reasons…(1) ad revenue, (2) there’s a belief that the extended life stories confer copyright to recipes, which otherwise cannot be copyrighted and (3) everyone does it. Source: I made SimplifyRecipe.com, which requires diving into the minutiae of recipe authors. Otherwise, I agree that getting consistent results from GPT is super useful.
SoftTalker 3y ago
Yes, who cares if the answer is hallucinated, as long as it's easy to read and stated in clear, confident-sounding language.
- Wowfunhappy 3y ago
  I agree in general, but part of what makes ChatGPT great for coding is that I can test the answers. They either work or they don't.
  - latexr 3y ago
    > They either work or they don't. Or they work for a selection of cases but not others. Or they seem to work in a limited number of tests but aren’t truly doing the right thing. Or they do work but have a security flaw that makes your service vulnerable. Coding solutions have tradeoffs and subtleties which go beyond “it did the thing right a couple of times when I ran it”. If that’s all it took to verify code is good, there wouldn’t be any bugs; you can test code a person writes too.
    - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
      Yes, ChatGPT can't do all the work for you. You have to know how to test the code thoroughly and think of edge cases and performance tradeoffs and all those other subtleties. But contrast this with other types of information. If I ask ChatGPT "how hot is the surface of the sun?" and it answers "15 million degrees Fahrenheit", I have zero ability to verify that information. As a result, I don't find ChatGPT useful for most informational searches, except the ones related to coding. (The example answer is wrong according to https://www.space.com/17137-how-hot-is-the-sun.html https://www.space.com/17137-how-hot-is-the-sun.html, albeit in a way that I could see potentially confusing an LLM.)
    - pornel 3y ago
      It's not much worse than a random blog or a stackoverflow answer. They never give you a guarantee that their answer is right for you. But the nice thing about ChatGPT is that you can give it more context than it is possible in a Google query, and you can ask follow-up questions.
renegat0x0 3y ago
The real problem is ad business. If chatgpt becomes monopoly we will see many ad banners. After several years of monopoly we will see chatgpt anders lacking so that you will have to see more banners in response. After some time quality of answers will depend on the amount of money you put into your chatgpt subscription. You will not be able to go back to google. There will be no google any more.
- EA-3167 3y ago
  The only really workable solution imo is that search companies need to make their money on searches, not ads; something like Kagi I guess. Any perverse incentive is inimical to a really good search engine. I think the internet is going to start to stratify into paid and "free" tiers going forward, and honestly it's about goddamned time.
  - zirgs 3y ago
    A huge drawback of Kagi is that it requires an account and can associate your search history with it. Using other search engines while not logged in is more privacy friendly.
    - ahartmetz 3y ago
      That problem seems very solvable if they don't need to monetize your data. You might, for example, turn off search history and the use of search history to guess what you might mean with new searches.
      - zirgs 3y ago
        Turning search history off doesn't mean that they stop recording in in their database. I have no way to verify that.
      - ipaddr 3y ago
        Kagi keeps track of all queries because they are charging you for each one or removing from daily quota
intellix 3y ago
And, not only that. When it explains something and you don't understand, you can ask it to rephrase or give analogies. I guess the only thing missing is imagery
- flangola7 3y ago
  Think bigger than imagery. Just have it create the physical thing you seek.
motbus3 3y ago
I've been doing the same For basic stuff it is much faster than Google. But if it requires minimum thinking it still faster doing myself. The other day I was lazy to find a generic scraper I have so I could save a reference manual. I know it is just like 50 lines of code and if you are smart you could do it async. I tried with ChatGPT and it didn't work at all. Many silly mistakes hidden between comments that looked reasonable
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
dmurray 3y ago
I love the way there are 10 competing folk explanations for "why are recipe pages online so long?" Spending time on the page should actually be a great proxy for usefulness on recipe websites. If it's a long page of introduction and anecdotes, maybe it took me three minutes instead of one to reject it as unpromising. If it's the recipe I actually used, however, that tab is going to be open for the next thirty minutes or more.
- iainmerrick 3y ago
  Are there really 10 different explanations? I’ve seen “they’re long so there’s more space for ads” and “they’re long so you spend more time there so it doesn’t get penalised by google”, and to me those are pretty closely related.
  - sam_bristow 3y ago
    There's also the "recipes aren't copyrightable, but the fluff about grandma baking cookies is" explanation.
    - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
      I see that one a lot and it doesn't hold up to scrutiny because copyright on grandma isn't how recipe websites make their money. They trade in a generic field flooded with fly-by-nights that exist exclusively to run ads. They don't care nor need to care whether their filler material isn't copied.
  - moreati 3y ago
    I've also seen "the recipe itself isn't copyrightable, so they add prose/filler that is".
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
- flakeoil 3y ago
lordgrenville 3y ago
Funnily enough, I see this as one of the biggest disadvantages of ChatGPT. I am used to searching the web and navigating results, and have developed a lot of heuristics for assessing the credibility of a page. ChatGPT flattens the true, not-true-but-maybe-helpful, and straight up time-wasting BS into the same confident patter. So I have to treat everything it says with equal scepticism.
- theSuda 3y ago
  I agree. I usually end up finding alternate methods or hints to look for a completely different approach (especially from stack overflow).
- flangola7 3y ago
  The time wasting SEO BS is all but non existent in my use. ChatGPT has nearly eliminated Google because if I want to find the best 10 films involving aliens in the 90s by obscure directors I get exactly that, instead of three million pages of trash.
  - nottorp 3y ago
    > the best 10 films involving aliens in the 90s by obscure directors I get exactly that Actually you're probably getting someone's list of 10 best films that got copied to 1000 more sites and ended up training ChatGPT...
    - ozim 3y ago
      Still counts as a win I guess?
    - flangola7 3y ago
      I've asked very complicated contrived combinations that don't have any results on Google. GPT-4 still had no issue assembling the list.
- deeviant 3y ago
  Two Paths: 1. Build a skill set to navigate millions of pages of fluff SEO garbage and gain intuition of which sites are more likely to be credibility based on something akin to a internet dosing rod. 2. Build skill set to evaluate if a statement or claim is factually true. i.e. ChatGPT just told me something, how likely is it to be true. I know which skill set I would rather develop, obviously #2, as it's transferable to nearly every intellectual venture a human would consider, while #1 is not. Also, I feel the people that play the FUD campaign on GPT hallucinations just haven't used it much. The average quality of GPT answers, at least in programming, is far above the average hit on google, and the fact that I can interact with the answer and shape it to go in any direction I want or mix it match it with nearly any other concept on the spot, it's light years more valuable than the average google search. At this point, I would guess I only resort to google 10% of what I used to, and it's normally to attempt to find a specific website that has specific information I remember accessing before that I want to look up again.
croes 3y ago
ChatGPT now is like Google in its beginning, sooner or later ads and "optimizations" will kill it.
- mrkramer 3y ago
  There is a YouTube Premium and I don't see a reason why there couldn't exist Google Search Premium but that again doesn't solve the problem of SEO spam and garbage websites.
  - reportgunner 3y ago
    > I don't see a reason why there couldn't exist Google Search Premium Probably because there would be barely anything left in the results once ads and spam are removed.
    - mrkramer 3y ago
      It would make room for relevant results.

by johnfn 3y ago

Maxion 3y ago

Especially for these type of simple syntax questions that autocomplete or copilot isn’t getting. It’s so so quick to ask ChatGPT for the answer, rather than finding the documentation for the thing you’re looking for and parsing it.

eastbound 3y ago

Can’t wait until they (actually) monetize ChatGPT and maximize the time spent on the website, like Google. Can’t wait until ChatGPT says that, when their grandma went to school, they too needed to mentally add 26 + 13, and the teacher would always frown on pupils when they gave the answer 31. ChatGPT’s strength is that it’s new on the market, needs to build an audience, and therefore their UI and UX are lean, devoid of gaming. Same as Google, up until 2008.

johnfn 3y ago
I'm not convinced this is the case. Unlike Google, ChatGPT has clear monetization channels which are not advertising, like ChatGPT+, which is already doing very well, and it's easy to imagine further channels which allow access to specialized models. Additionally, unlike Google, you can only really get away with making your service crappy when you have such a strong moat that it's still significantly better than the competition. The only moat OpenAI has is its model, which is proving a lot easier to replicate than Google circa 2008's moat.
- add-sub-mul-div 3y ago
  Cable TV has a clear monetization channel, surely there are no ads there.
upmostly 3y ago
They have. We pay $20 per month to get priority access. A lot more than I've ever paid to use the Google search engine. Paid for service over ads is the new way forward.
- krageon 3y ago
  Ads and shit doesn't exist because there isn't a clear way to extract value. They exist because the folks that make decisions love ads and shit. You will end up paying a subscription for a bad product with few alternatives, just like most folks end up using Google now and pay with all their data. There simply isn't a good search engine, Google murdered all the real competition and what was left is mediocre.

penjelly 3y ago

even the fact that you always go to that same window, with the same format and interface lowers cognitive load imo. Of course chatgpt hasnt been a magic bullet for me yet, but it definitely eases the pain of developing things outside your usual perview

josephg 3y ago
I’m travelling in France at the moment and chatgpt is an absolutely incredible tour guide. Yesterday we asked it what “RF” inscribed in a crest on a government building meant (“République Française”). A few days ago we asked why an area was called Gobelins, and if that had any relationship to the modern goblins in fantasy. I asked how to ask for more bread at the table and it gave me a pretty long, fancy French sentence. I asked it to simplify the sentence and it did beautifully. You can ask Google translate to translate something, but chatgpt can give you multiple translations, and tell you the cultural nuances of all of them and teach you French grammar while it’s at it. “How do I say this? Why does it use suis in that sentence? Is that a weird thing to say to the wait staff at a restaurant? What is the protocol there?” Etc. We’ve been using it constantly.

radres 3y ago

Definitely the fact that I am not going to deal with ads when I am looking for something is a gamechanger.

KnobbleMcKnees 3y ago
I do wonder: does / how does chatGPT differentiate between ad-driven content and regular content? For example, if I ask what the best vacuum cleaner on the market is, I'd rather it not regurgitate bestvacuumreviews.net which is affiliate (not quality) driven

iambateman 3y ago

It used to be why Recipe websites were so long, but that’s no longer the case. There’s three reasons…(1) ad revenue, (2) there’s a belief that the extended life stories confer copyright to recipes, which otherwise cannot be copyrighted and (3) everyone does it. Source: I made SimplifyRecipe.com, which requires diving into the minutiae of recipe authors. Otherwise, I agree that getting consistent results from GPT is super useful.

SoftTalker 3y ago

Yes, who cares if the answer is hallucinated, as long as it's easy to read and stated in clear, confident-sounding language.

Wowfunhappy 3y ago
I agree in general, but part of what makes ChatGPT great for coding is that I can test the answers. They either work or they don't.
- latexr 3y ago
  > They either work or they don't. Or they work for a selection of cases but not others. Or they seem to work in a limited number of tests but aren’t truly doing the right thing. Or they do work but have a security flaw that makes your service vulnerable. Coding solutions have tradeoffs and subtleties which go beyond “it did the thing right a couple of times when I ran it”. If that’s all it took to verify code is good, there wouldn’t be any bugs; you can test code a person writes too.
  - Wowfunhappy 3y ago
    Yes, ChatGPT can't do all the work for you. You have to know how to test the code thoroughly and think of edge cases and performance tradeoffs and all those other subtleties. But contrast this with other types of information. If I ask ChatGPT "how hot is the surface of the sun?" and it answers "15 million degrees Fahrenheit", I have zero ability to verify that information. As a result, I don't find ChatGPT useful for most informational searches, except the ones related to coding. (The example answer is wrong according to https://www.space.com/17137-how-hot-is-the-sun.html https://www.space.com/17137-how-hot-is-the-sun.html, albeit in a way that I could see potentially confusing an LLM.)
  - pornel 3y ago
    It's not much worse than a random blog or a stackoverflow answer. They never give you a guarantee that their answer is right for you. But the nice thing about ChatGPT is that you can give it more context than it is possible in a Google query, and you can ask follow-up questions.

renegat0x0 3y ago

The real problem is ad business. If chatgpt becomes monopoly we will see many ad banners. After several years of monopoly we will see chatgpt anders lacking so that you will have to see more banners in response. After some time quality of answers will depend on the amount of money you put into your chatgpt subscription. You will not be able to go back to google. There will be no google any more.

EA-3167 3y ago
The only really workable solution imo is that search companies need to make their money on searches, not ads; something like Kagi I guess. Any perverse incentive is inimical to a really good search engine. I think the internet is going to start to stratify into paid and "free" tiers going forward, and honestly it's about goddamned time.
- zirgs 3y ago
  A huge drawback of Kagi is that it requires an account and can associate your search history with it. Using other search engines while not logged in is more privacy friendly.
  - ahartmetz 3y ago
    That problem seems very solvable if they don't need to monetize your data. You might, for example, turn off search history and the use of search history to guess what you might mean with new searches.
    - zirgs 3y ago
      Turning search history off doesn't mean that they stop recording in in their database. I have no way to verify that.
    - ipaddr 3y ago
      Kagi keeps track of all queries because they are charging you for each one or removing from daily quota

intellix 3y ago

And, not only that. When it explains something and you don't understand, you can ask it to rephrase or give analogies. I guess the only thing missing is imagery

flangola7 3y ago
Think bigger than imagery. Just have it create the physical thing you seek.

motbus3 3y ago

I've been doing the same For basic stuff it is much faster than Google. But if it requires minimum thinking it still faster doing myself. The other day I was lazy to find a generic scraper I have so I could save a reference manual. I know it is just like 50 lines of code and if you are smart you could do it async. I tried with ChatGPT and it didn't work at all. Many silly mistakes hidden between comments that looked reasonable

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]

dmurray 3y ago

I love the way there are 10 competing folk explanations for "why are recipe pages online so long?" Spending time on the page should actually be a great proxy for usefulness on recipe websites. If it's a long page of introduction and anecdotes, maybe it took me three minutes instead of one to reject it as unpromising. If it's the recipe I actually used, however, that tab is going to be open for the next thirty minutes or more.

iainmerrick 3y ago
Are there really 10 different explanations? I’ve seen “they’re long so there’s more space for ads” and “they’re long so you spend more time there so it doesn’t get penalised by google”, and to me those are pretty closely related.
- sam_bristow 3y ago
  There's also the "recipes aren't copyrightable, but the fluff about grandma baking cookies is" explanation.
  - BugsJustFindMe 3y ago
    I see that one a lot and it doesn't hold up to scrutiny because copyright on grandma isn't how recipe websites make their money. They trade in a generic field flooded with fly-by-nights that exist exclusively to run ads. They don't care nor need to care whether their filler material isn't copied.
- moreati 3y ago
  I've also seen "the recipe itself isn't copyrightable, so they add prose/filler that is".
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
flakeoil 3y ago

lordgrenville 3y ago

Funnily enough, I see this as one of the biggest disadvantages of ChatGPT. I am used to searching the web and navigating results, and have developed a lot of heuristics for assessing the credibility of a page. ChatGPT flattens the true, not-true-but-maybe-helpful, and straight up time-wasting BS into the same confident patter. So I have to treat everything it says with equal scepticism.

theSuda 3y ago
I agree. I usually end up finding alternate methods or hints to look for a completely different approach (especially from stack overflow).
flangola7 3y ago
The time wasting SEO BS is all but non existent in my use. ChatGPT has nearly eliminated Google because if I want to find the best 10 films involving aliens in the 90s by obscure directors I get exactly that, instead of three million pages of trash.
- nottorp 3y ago
  > the best 10 films involving aliens in the 90s by obscure directors I get exactly that Actually you're probably getting someone's list of 10 best films that got copied to 1000 more sites and ended up training ChatGPT...
  - ozim 3y ago
    Still counts as a win I guess?
  - flangola7 3y ago
    I've asked very complicated contrived combinations that don't have any results on Google. GPT-4 still had no issue assembling the list.
deeviant 3y ago
Two Paths: 1. Build a skill set to navigate millions of pages of fluff SEO garbage and gain intuition of which sites are more likely to be credibility based on something akin to a internet dosing rod. 2. Build skill set to evaluate if a statement or claim is factually true. i.e. ChatGPT just told me something, how likely is it to be true. I know which skill set I would rather develop, obviously #2, as it's transferable to nearly every intellectual venture a human would consider, while #1 is not. Also, I feel the people that play the FUD campaign on GPT hallucinations just haven't used it much. The average quality of GPT answers, at least in programming, is far above the average hit on google, and the fact that I can interact with the answer and shape it to go in any direction I want or mix it match it with nearly any other concept on the spot, it's light years more valuable than the average google search. At this point, I would guess I only resort to google 10% of what I used to, and it's normally to attempt to find a specific website that has specific information I remember accessing before that I want to look up again.

croes 3y ago

ChatGPT now is like Google in its beginning, sooner or later ads and "optimizations" will kill it.

mrkramer 3y ago
There is a YouTube Premium and I don't see a reason why there couldn't exist Google Search Premium but that again doesn't solve the problem of SEO spam and garbage websites.
- reportgunner 3y ago
  > I don't see a reason why there couldn't exist Google Search Premium Probably because there would be barely anything left in the results once ads and spam are removed.
  - mrkramer 3y ago
    It would make room for relevant results.