It’s basically good at generating text you don’t ever want to spend time reading leave alone writing and is only needing to be written for beauracratic reasons. To be honest I don’t see it as that big a win, it’s a fairly niche service.
It's a pretty good search engine already. I asked it the following questions on a complex social science topic from a certain country that would have taken me hours of researching and reading:
1) Explain what they are. [Explained them well.]
2) Give me examples of them in language1's literature. [It listed two books that I then verified as accurate.]
3) Are there phrases or idioms for it in other languages? [It gave equivalent idioms in Russian and two other languages]
4) Any examples for it in English literature. [It gave Hamlet and an author book I hadn't heard of. Verified that the book is accurate.)
5) Any terms for it in the academic fields of psychology and social psychology [It explained two concepts from both fields that seemed to match. I confirmed them as correct from other sources.]
It demonstrated abstraction, generalization, and hypernymy.
And actually expanded my knowledge on multiple axes - across languages, across literature, and across fields.
If a person had written an essay by compiling those answers, I wouldn't be able to identify that it's AI and not human knowledge that had written it.
Were you able to, and did you, verify its answer? In my experience it gives wrong but plausible sounding replies as often as it gives correct answers, so you have to factor in verification time when comparing the amount of work.
You're right about the additional time in general. But for much of the information on the web, readers assume the author is speaking from genuine knowledge and has verified the information. IMO it's a better search engine than Google, especially for conceptually complex topics.
I have found it to be a very good verbose search engine that is just wrong 25% of the time. Like “how do I do X in Julia” will give me the answer or just random noise that looks like an answer, but it’s faster than trawling through Google _if an answer exists_
Yeah, I tried it for questions where Google failed me, and ChatGPT then failed me as well, giving either unhelpful answers (sidestepping the point of the question) or wrong answers.
Honest question: have you used it? Because if you did, you'd see its leaps and bounds better than clicking on a handful of links, scanning through verbose and poorly written answers in Stack Overflow, until you find the right one.
It doesn't replace SO, but it certainly complements it. Plus, it acts more like an assistant (and, per OP's post, "...who is often wrong - need to read their work thoroughly").
A lot of answers on StackOverflow are just awful -- the bar is incredibly low. I'm not sure SO will serve even a quarter of its current traffic by 2025.
