Originally Posted by
Jeff Neese
There's no difference between using any of these new tools, and looking up information the old-fashioned way.
No, but I might object to some equivocation in how you're leveraging the word "using." Generally when someone "uses" a traditional search engine to assist in constructing a forum post, for example, they're not assuming that the raw output from a preliminary search is suitable for direct use as that forum post.
Now, current LLM chatbots are maybe somewhat different due to how they correlate concepts, and how their primary output is natural-language text. I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with leveraging them to write forum posts. However, they're still in a preliminary state, and their ability to produce meaningful and appropriate answers is still fairly reliant on the user's subject understanding.
Another danger with the new chatbots is that the apparent coherence of their responses leads people to overly trust their rigor. For example, you're a strong advocate of using a chatbot to cite sources. But you've demonstrated it with a chatbot that
isn't actually designed for this purpose, and which frequently hallucinates references to sources that don't exist.