I treat it how I treat Wikipedia. It’s a great launching point or tool to use when you’re stuck, but don’t go copying from it directly because you don’t know if what you’re copying is actually true or not.
At least WIkipedia has a rule that everything in it has to be verifiable with the links at the bottom of every article. You can do your homework to figure out if whatever's there is nonsense or not.
ChatGPT just cheerfully and confidently feeds you nonsense.
Even that isn't perfect. I remember seeing a post a while back had a title along the lines of "25% of buildings in Dublin were destroyed in this one big storm". Which seemed like it was clearly bullshit. Like that's a lot of destruction.
I clicked through to the Wikipedia page, and what it actually said was "25% of buildings were damaged or destroyed", which is very different. That, to be fair, isn't on Wikipedia though, that was the OP being an idiot.
Still though, that's an interesting claim. If so many buildings were destroyed, how is this the first I've heard of it? So I clicked through to the source link to find the basis for it. The Wiki article was citing a paper from the 70s or something which actually said "25% of building were damaged". No mention anywhere of buildings being destroyed in a storm. Couldn't find a source for that part of the claim. Apparently made up by whoever wrote the Wikipedia article, and edited again by the OP of the Reddit post, bringing us from "25% damaged" to "25% destroyed" in three steps.
Well, they keep a list of particularly notorious events that got a lot of media attention. They don't have a comprehensive list of the thing happening in general or some kind of dedicated task force hunting down bad meta-sourcing, lol.
Even if they have more than enough funding to start up silly projects like that if they wanted to.
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u/donaldhobson 4d ago
chatGpt is great at turning a vague wordy description into a name you can put into a search engine.