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How would you know if the chat is "wholly correct factually", unless you look at other spurces? It is not uncommon for even it's citations to simply not exist.

Wikipedia sometimes has similar problems, but it has generally gotten pretty good over the years on many topics. I still wouldn't cite Wikipedia on something so politically charged as the Israel-Palestine conflict.

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Definitely should've said "use as a source" not "cite". Like you note, wikipedia, and chatgpt for that matter are great not for "i need 100% confidence this is correct" queries but "i want to know where to dig deeper" queries. I wouldn't cite wikipedia itself, but I also wouldn't be shied away from a primary source found from wikipedia. And that to me makes wikipedia as useful if not more useful than the primary source itself, because if I can't find the primary source what good is it? Tree falling in the forrest and all that.

Sure, but the point stands that the original poster actually cited ChatGPT as their research, which is where all the reactions cam from. They didn't say "I found these sources from ChatGPT", they just gave us a ChatGPT log as a source.

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