"Consumer AI is just the new search" anecdote: [1/3]
Casual non-techy coworkers yesterday were talking about using excel reports to analyze data & turns out two of the people use #ChatGPT to know how to do something in excel.
So, before this #AI stuff, if you were like, "how do I do X in Excel" in google, you'd get a bunch of hits and then have to wade through the results to see which link was actually what you were looking for, then test out if their solution works.
"Consumer AI is just the new search" anecdote: [2/3]
Now, you do the same thing, but in #ChatGPT, even just upload a photo of what you are trying to do, and instead of a bunch of dubious links, you get an answer that probably works. That probability is just as good as the probability after combing through search results yourself, but without the combing.
"Consumer AI is just the new search" anecdote: [3/3]
There are over 1 billion websites with over 30 billion web pages out there on the internet and regular search absolutely sucks now. It's no wonder normies are seeing #ChatGPT as magic when it can take 30 billion+ results and give you one answer that's most likely what you are looking for.
@renwillis@tess Yeah they've been demonstrably degrading search results since at least 2015, probably earlier. The AI "boom" is just accelerating that trend.
Kinda related, I was recently given “API documentation” which was just a 260 page PDF with no apparent structure or easy “getting started” section, so I dumped it in Claude, asked it how I would perform the 2 things I needed to do, and it gave me workable code and references to the pages in the docs I needed.
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