It’s clearly different in that ChatGPT sounds authoritative but you still have to track down sources and make sure they’re correctly summarized and accurate. Search doesn’t give you the impression that you’re doing anything else but ChatGPT always sounds authoritative even when it’s wrong, which makes it a hazard for the people who need it the most because they don’t have the personal expertise to recognize when it goes off track.
There’s a key difference to understand: web pages have individual reputation. If I see something about the moon landings on NASA.gov I assign it a different trust level than something I read on youcanthandlethetruth.social, whereas LLM output comes with the imprimatur of the company which made the system. Some LLMs do generate citations but those don’t always exist, come from authoritative sources, or say what they’re listed as saying but users are notoriously prone to not checking unless they’re primed to be suspicious.
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It’s clearly different in that ChatGPT sounds authoritative but you still have to track down sources and make sure they’re correctly summarized and accurate. Search doesn’t give you the impression that you’re doing anything else but ChatGPT always sounds authoritative even when it’s wrong, which makes it a hazard for the people who need it the most because they don’t have the personal expertise to recognize when it goes off track.
And webpages always sound authoritative even when they're wrong.
There’s a key difference to understand: web pages have individual reputation. If I see something about the moon landings on NASA.gov I assign it a different trust level than something I read on youcanthandlethetruth.social, whereas LLM output comes with the imprimatur of the company which made the system. Some LLMs do generate citations but those don’t always exist, come from authoritative sources, or say what they’re listed as saying but users are notoriously prone to not checking unless they’re primed to be suspicious.