Something that was eye opening to me was exactly how much blatantly false information it's capable of spewing:
The consensus from a brief search of previous questions on r/AskHistorians seems to be that ChatGPT is an unreliable source for specific historical questions. But is it a good source If I'm looking for literature or resources on a subject?
AskHistorians is a highly moderated subreddit that requires expertise and sources from those answering questions and there have been a number of topics about using ChatGPT to learn historical perspectives, this specific topic I linked was more about using ChatGPT to recommend resources for further learning on a subject, and a couple experts in their fields showed that Chat GPT would simply fabricate books from time to time, more frequently when the subject is more narrow.
Quote:
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The more specific the question gets, the more this will happen. For example, I tried asking it to recommend three books on the Soviet takeover of Lithuania.
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The commentor shows 3 books and a one or two sentence synopsis of each book that Chat GPT recommended. Two of the books and authors do not actually exist.
I mostly ignored everything until GPT-4 was announced, was extremely impressed with the demo they did upon it's release, and have been learning more about it since then. I have a friend who works in marketing who pays for Chat GPT 4 for unlimited queries/access and uses it every day for her job and it saves her a ton of time. There's a lot of discussion on programmer forums about the use of it, with most senior developers talking about using it to help debug code and to help write unit tests. My impression is that people are getting real value when using it for specific time saving tasks in an area you're already an expert in, but that it is unbelievably flawed and without having a wealth of knowledge on a subject already it's very easy to get screwed by it's output.