Like most of you, I used reddit as solely my only source for finding information. Looking to hear your guys’ thoughts on this topic, and hopefully explain and share some knowledge in a more sophisticated manner than I can describe. (also, I hope this is an appropriate place to post?)

I have ran into this discussion a few times across the fediverse, but I can’t for the life of my find those threads and comments lol

I believe that a non-corporate owned platform with user-generated information is most optimal, like wikipedia. I don’t know the technicalities, but I feel like AI can’t replace answers from human experiences - humans who are enthusiasts and care about helping each other and not making money. This is one of those things where I feel like I know the “best” way to find information, but I don’t know the deep answers of why, and what makes the other platforms worse (aside from the obvious ads, bloatware, and corporate greed)

I don’t know much about this topic, but I’m curious if you guys have actual real answers! Thread-based services like this and stack overflow (?) vs chatgpt vs bing vs google, etc.

EDIT: Wow, all your responses are fantastic. I’m not very knowledgeable about the subject so I can’t really continue everyone’s responses with a discussion, but I love and appreciate the insight in this thread! But I’ll try to think of some follow up questions :)

  • @[email protected]
    5•1 year ago

    Deep learning randomly recombines its input (e.g., text OpenAI found crawling Reddit and Stack Overflow) based on how frequently various groups of words are used together in its input. So its output is not “information” in the ordinary sense, or if you like, the only information you can glean from it is a vague sense of how other people have used words before, in general.

    As a result, its credible use cases are pretty slim. If you need large quantities of extremely banal text, ChatGPT is your man. If you want to learn something, look elsewhere.

    Though I will mention the use case I’m exploring at the moment, with… moderate success: using it as a Spanish chat bot, since I really need to learn Spanish.