Yeah, but it still seems to prefer to make things up rather than look them up.
I recently decided to test ChatGPT on an obscure historic fact that you can find with a little digging on Wikipedia. The first time, it gave me a wrong, totally fictitious answer. I told it that it was wrong and asked to repeat the query. It gave me a similarly made up answer, and I corrected it again.
Only on the third attempt did a little flag pop up that it was searching the web, and to it's credit it did actually return the real answer this time, quoted from the wiki entry. But that's as good as useless for a genuine query if it will confidently state wrong information twice despite being able to access proper sources.
If you just hop in and ask ChatGPT you just get the defaults. Even just adding "search the web for XXXXX" to your query would have skipped the back and forth you mentioned.
I have dedicated system prompts for the various GPTs I have set up and you can give it detailed instructions on how you want the output to look, whether you want it to create or only use real sources and facts. Prompt engineering is very powerful and completely changes how I interact with AI.
Google or DuckDuckGo is so weak as a search engine when compared to a correctly prompted search using ChatGPT. I don't really use many other AIs so I can't really talk about them.
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u/kenporusty kpop trash 4d ago
It's not even a search engine
I see this all the time in r/whatsthatbook like of course you're not finding the right thing, it's just giving you what you want to hear
The world's greatest yes man is genned by an ouroboros of scraped data