Compared to what exactly? The ad-fueled, SEO-optimized nightmare that is modern web search? Or perhaps the rampant propaganda and blatant falsehoods on social media?
Whoever is blindly trusting what ChatGPT is spitting out is also falling for whatever garbage they’re finding online. ChatGPT is not very smart, but at least it isn’t intentionally deceptive.
I think it’s an incredible improvement for the low information user over any current alternatives.
And there are plenty of logical problems that many humans can’t solve. Does that mean they’re not capable of reasoning?
At what point would you say something has reasoning? I’d argue that it’s more about how good something is at reasoning, rather than saying it is or isn’t capable of reasoning in absolute terms.
AI slop already produces many plausible-sounding articles used as infotainment and in academia. We already know this slop adds much noise to the signal and that poor signal slows actual research in both cases. But until now, the slop wasn't masquerading specifically as research! It was presented as an assistant, which provides no accuracy guarantees. “Research” by the word’s common meanings does.
This is why it will do harm. There is no doubt in my mind. And I believe OpenAI knows it. They have quite smart engineers, certainly clever enough to figure it out.
And if you think that all published “research” was guaranteed to be accurate before AI tools became available, then I think you should start looking more critically at sources yourself.
AI companies promising their LLMs will now do “research” won’t help.
And research that’s done outside of the academia (like business or independent thinker research) will be more muddied, with more people misled.