I am a Gen Z university student. The ChatGPT got boom when I was in 12th grade and I have been using ChatGPT, Gemini and Deepseek since then. I am starting to notice that now I cannot do searching anymore. I literally cannot do anything on my own like coding, learning something, fact checking, doing my assignments. I even become so reliant on it that I sometime even ask it what food should I eat, what exercises I should do. Sometimes, I “talk” with ChatGPT more than real human beings, maybe cuz I somehow end up having a bad experience or not so fulfilling experience with people. I have to use AI again and again for the same question, e.g., I asked a question today, I got the answer. If I encountered that question later again, I would not know the answer and have to go to AI for solution. What to do now? How to get out of this dependence on AI?
Don’t be too hard on yourself for not being able to search, I’m a student who’s not used AI yet, and I think searching using a search engine is a difficult task
The LLMs made search engines near useless by publishing mountains of slop - it’s almost all noise and no signal.
I frequently get top three search results for things like “how to sharpen an electric razor” where the article is 5 paragraphs of garbage and then “step one, remove razor, step two sharpen razor, step three enjoy your sharp razor!” … Then another 5 paragraphs of pointless slop.
Fucking infuriating.
Even before LLMs, SEO optimized garbage was already a problem. It’s frankly amazing how this tech made life worse for the vast majority of people
Got a tip recently to limit the search range to pre-2024. Won’t work for everything, like current events, but will work for a lot, like heat transfer and normal shock wave equations.