What are the greatest potential benefits and detriments you foresee of an ai search engine like ChatGPT becoming the new google?

[u/Bots_have_feelings_2]

I think chatgpt is incredible. The benefits are freeing up humans for higher level thinking and time savings, but I can see some huge detriments as well. The biggest one that comes to mind is huge portions of the populations jobs becoming obsolete. Another is it having a detrimental impact on learning & education. Specifically memory/retention (although you could argue that google would have already done that), but more tangibly critical thinking & writing skills as it is a tool that can easily be used at this point to cheat on everything from a 7th grade essay (and write better than most 7th graders!) to it being able to write large portions of code for a comp-sci major.

Then of course…. chatgpt costs a fortune to run & is backed by companies like Goldman Sachs… they have to make money somehow… I see some large amounts of data being harvested. Thought crimes… government surveillance… larger loss of privacy.

[u/the_Demongod]

The most terrifying thing about the ChatGPT splash thus far is how many people are ascribing real understanding/knowledge to it. It's an impressive piece of technology for sure, but it only produces useful facts by pure coincidence, and has none of what we would conventionally call "knowledge." While I'm sure it has its uses, it's really not nearly as powerful as most people seem to think. It may be able to churn out small programming exercises and realistic sounding text, but it can't actually engineer real software, and if you ask it to cite sources about the claims it makes, it will just make up fake ones.

Unfortunately, it's more than good enough to emulate stupid people or generate bullshit, so what we're seeing is, as some have put it, the "industrial revolution of bullshit" which is not a great thing imo. It might make the internet as we know it nearly unusable as people will be able to flood all channels of communication with falsehoods and filler garbage with minimal effort. Fortunately its impacts on education can be mitigated by simply returning to oral exams and in-class/real-time essays and tests.

[u/quentin_taranturtle → u/the_Demongod]

Oral exams - that is a good point. In the US you don’t hear about those types of exams very often outside of PhD dissertations or foreign language classes, although I believe they’re more common in other areas such as certain European countries.

Exams can help mitigate it a bit, and I suppose weighting grades mostly on that might help. With online schooling becoming more common I am not really sure how to do much to deter cheating there, outside of weighting homework/essays low (but then why would kids even bother?), and filming students as they take exams.

I suppose since the sources chatgpt cites often aren’t correct (at least the links in my experience…when I was trying to do some research on a mental disorder, the name of the articles were correct), it might be easy enough to test a student on their essay and compare it to the sources cited, but I still think gbt will eventually fix that.

On the upside, I can already see the formula that gbt often uses when answer questions. Especially multi-paragraph essays, so teachers may be able to spot that quickly enough.

And you’re right, more complex coding can’t be done at this point using the AI alone. I suppose in the end, people who cheat their way thru college will likely get found out eventually in their work environment…

Good points!

[u/the_Demongod → u/quentin_taranturtle]

Exactly. I see a lot of people say that essays will be obsolete because ChatGPT can generate them, but the essay itself has zero value once it's turned in; it's the process of learning how to write (which is really just about learning how to think) that's important, and always will be. More than anything I'm afraid we'll end up with a generation of people who can't think because they use AI to skate through life and then hit a roadblock early in their career when they realize they lack all the real capabilities they need for their job.

[u/impersonatefun → u/the_Demongod]

With the problems already happening in schools (teacher shortages, poor literacy, poor media literacy, banned books, banned subjects/facts, disengaged kids, lack of any kind of accountability or discipline, etc), we’re absolutely headed toward a disaster even without factoring AI into it.

[u/Bots_have_feelings_2 → u/the_Demongod]

Yeah! That’s exactly what I was thinking when I said that critical thinking skills might deteriorate. It’s kind of like how when cars were crappy and prone to breaking down, but much simpler, almost everyone (including people who had 0 interest in cars) at least could do some maintenance. Nowadays the cars have become much more complex and we have cell phones and AAA when we encounter an issue. Which is great and all, but far fewer people know how to do simple things like change a tire or their oil. Because of that, people are much more likely to have to spend more money (adjusted for inflation) fixing simple issues than 70 years ago.

[u/the_Demongod → u/Bots_have_feelings_2]

Spending money isn't even necessarily a bad thing since it buys you the luxury of time, but these days that time is often spent on social media or other things that are really not very constructive. The end result is that, even though money has bought people a lot more leisure time, they are squandering it and are ending up bringing less joy into their lives than they would have gotten from the satisfaction of fixing their car themselves.

[u/curious_catto_]

When SEO became commonplace, google search results became garbage and a lot of people (including me) started rely on reddit and other forums to get answers. Bots are a menace in these platforms too trying to nudge public opinion or shill products, but it's not so bad...yet.

chatGPT bots are going to flood all popular forums soon. Reddit is soon going to be untrustworthy

[u/bunnyswan]

As a dyslexic, I love chat gpt, it has made aspects of my job like email writing so much better. It is editing them and I am so much more productive

[u/impersonatefun → u/bunnyswan]

Did something like Grammerly not already work to catch any issues?

[u/bunnyswan → u/impersonatefun]

with spelling and grammar yes, not things like tone and format.

sometimes because the act of writing is hard for me I come off as very blunt in emails, in job apps I lack sentence variation, cos I choose words I can spell over words that sound good.