Just curious since I think it is about to get a whole lot harder to search using google. hopefully this will signal the end of their monopoly.

  • loobkoob@kbin.social
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    6 months ago

    I wouldn’t recommend ChatGPT for factual information at all (at least, not without validating for yourself afterwards), but I think it’s quite good for helping you mull over or develop ideas, and for finding “soft answers” to things.

    I used it recently to suggest a font to use, for instance, and found it much, much better than trying to use a search engine. My font knowledge isn’t particularly high at all - I know what serif means but that’s about it as far as technical knowledge, and I wouldn’t recognise or categorise most fonts - but I was able to describe what I wanted to ChatGPT and narrow it down:

    • “I want something more friendly than that”
    • “less professional”
    • “more wonky”
    • “less rounded”
    • “less uncomfortable”

    And so on. I could be somewhat abstract with my requests and it still mostly seemed to understand what I meant. Eventually it suggested something that fit my requirements pretty well. Trying to find a similar suggestion via a search engine would have been very difficult, I think, and would basically have just relied on me stumbling on a “top 10 fonts for X” listicle that happened to cover my requirements.

    ChatGPT is fantastic within its specific niche (assuming you know how to feed it prompts properly and how to interpret its outputs - it’s a tool thats usefulness very much depends on the operator) but I definitely wouldn’t want it to replace search engines.

    • rufus@discuss.tchncs.de
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      6 months ago

      Hmmh. Would be interesting to find out if it has a concept of ‘rounded’ or ‘professional’ fonts, or if it just guessed random font names until you happened to like one if them. That isn’t always obvious and we have a tendency to see what we like/expect to see in such scenarios.

      Yeah, I have that conversation regularly here on Lemmy. People use ChatGPT for all kinds of stuff. I’m more into the downloadable models like Meta’s Llama model. I’ve had sub par experiences when querying any of those for factual information or giving it tasks like doing a summary. I also just use it for stuff like your example. And for creative or recreational purposes. It can also help with creativity, come up with ideas or rephrase things. And translation works well. At least that’s been my experience.