Why do I hate using chatGPT to replace search engines

My pc is overheated how do i cool it down because it is my life¹

Someone said that chatGPT will replace Google. Some kids/ early teenagers do often ask chatGPT for things that could have been found by Googling.

I really hate the idea of replacing search engines by chatGPT. The problem I have with it is not really about AI, but about how do we interact with it.

When we were kids and learnt how to use search engines, we acquired the skills of capturing important parts of the questions in our minds and turn them into keywords. Bashing questions like “my hard disk is full how can I get more space” usually get worse results than things like “hard disk space full solutions” as their counterparts.

Same thing applies to going to library and look for related books in the old days: you can’t expect to see there is a book titled almost the same as your question, you have to look for the suitable subject and go to the corr. book shelves, look for keywords and sometimes even look for keywords that is a superset of the things you want and hopefully get the answer in one of the chapters. I speculate that this process is important for training our abstraction ability.

But the chatGPT allows people to input their braindump like casually talking and get the answer.

Of cause, one can still train abstraction ability by something else, like in the older days when there were no search engines, even no internet. But if you know how to search, in most cases it would be faster and you will get more firm answers. And I hate the (bad type of) laziness shown when some people keep bashing long stupid questions into chatGPT and satisfied by shallow answers.

We all do this, but in other situations

I recently learnt the concepts of complementary cognitive artifacts and competitive cognitive artifacts from David Krakauer: https://nautil.us/will-ai-harm-us-better-to-ask-how-well-reckon-with-our-hybrid-nature-236098/ . You can think of them as a fancier way to say things that help you but make you dumb and those don’t. Competitiv cognitive artifacts aren’t always bad. Calculators are competitiv cognitive artifacts with respect to the ability of doing arithmetics manually. But do I care being bad at it? No. Is it important in general? Meh, most huamn beings don’t need to be good at arithmetics (as long as not bad enough to think 1+1=3 and grab 3 items in a buy-one-get-one-free sale and argue with the cashier). But the fluency of turning a question into something that can be googled reflects a basic level of abstraction as a thinking/ problem solving skill.

Well, the plot twist is, chatGPT fans can argue: “You can throw a question or even an article and ask chatGPT to extract the keywords for you!”. But I don’t think human beings can outsource thinking to machines.

First, for aesthetic reason, the effort of understanding the world and the insights and wisdom gain by ourselves are what makes our lives worth as human beings. Just getting the answer means nothing.

Moreover, if the service is provided by someone else, namely big techs at this moment, it is possible that it is not a “pure” LLM, it can be poisoned by artificial (as in artificial intelligence, lol) regulations. lcamtuf talked about this. Imagine a world in where people all believes the standards and decisions from a inhuman intelligent system which is actually just humans like in Psycho-Pass.

Final rant

Maybe I am too unreconstructed for this generation, but I think we are entering the age of impatience and chatGPT is just yet another product which encourages the culture of impatience.