this post was submitted on 17 Oct 2025
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I eat out and lately overhearing some people in other tables talking about how they find shit with ChatGPT, and it's not a good sign.
They stopped doing research as it used to be for about 30 years.
I can't really fault them for it tbh. Google has gotten so fucking bad over the last 10 years. Half of the results are just ads that don't necesarily have anything to do with your search.
Sure, use something else like Duckduckgo, but when you're already switching, why not switch to something that tends to be right 95% of the time, and where you don't need to be good at keywords, and can just write a paragraph of text and it'll figure out what you're looking for. If you're actually researching something you're bound to look at the sources anyway, instead of just what the LLM writes.
The ease of access of LLMs, and the complete and utter enshittyfication of Google is why so many people choose an LLM.
I had a song intermittently stuck in my head for over a decade, couldn't remember the artist, song name, or any of the lyrics. I only had the genre, language it was in, and a vague, memory-degraded description of a music video. Over the years I'd tried to find it on search engines a bunch of times to no avail, using every prompt I could think of. ChatGPT got it in one. So yeah, it's very useful for stuff like that. Was a great feeling to scratch that itch after so long. But I wouldn't trust an LLM with anything important.
LLM are good at certain things, especially involving language (unsurprisingly). They're tools. They're not the be-all-end-all like a lot of tech bros proselytize them as, but they are useful if you know their limitations
If you use them properly, they can be a valuable addition to one's search for information. The problem is that I don't think most users use them properly.