> If I know enough to know if the answer is good or bad, why would I be asking a chat bot?
I mean, taken to the extreme, I can probably read through the source of VLC and know that it's correct, given enough years to read it and study video compression standards etc. Does that mean I don't get use out of someone else having written VLC for me?
Knowing something is right and producing it are completely different things. You might be thinking of ChatGPT too narrowly, as a simple question-answer thing, but even now you can ask it to write code that will save you time, and scale it up by a few factors and it's doing the equivalent of writing new libraries for you. (Probably many years before it can write VLC for you, if ever.)
This is not the same thing at all. You know whether a tool like VLC works because it has a pretty well-defined scope for "works": it plays the video or audio file you clicked on.
If you're asking ChatGPT to teach you something, you have no such easy verification you can do: you essentially need to learn the same material from another source in order to cross-check it. Obviously this is easy for small factual questions. If I ask ChatGPT the circumference of the Earth, I can quickly figure out whether it's reliable or not on that point. But at the other extreme if I ask it to do a music theory analysis of the Goldberg Variations, it's going to take me about as much work to validate the output as to have just done the analysis myself.
I mean, taken to the extreme, I can probably read through the source of VLC and know that it's correct, given enough years to read it and study video compression standards etc. Does that mean I don't get use out of someone else having written VLC for me?
Knowing something is right and producing it are completely different things. You might be thinking of ChatGPT too narrowly, as a simple question-answer thing, but even now you can ask it to write code that will save you time, and scale it up by a few factors and it's doing the equivalent of writing new libraries for you. (Probably many years before it can write VLC for you, if ever.)