Intelligent people use a host of resources, including ChatGPT to expand their knowledge. However, every knowledge source has limitations. That is why you need a lot of different resources to ensure that the information you get is accurate. Below, your will see a brief summary of the strengths and weaknesses of the various information sources including ChatGPT.
The Newspaper and Television Media
The value of these media is the information they provide when dealing with issues that have a minimal political element. However, there are some caveats. Newspapers, such as The New York Times and The New York Post, typically choose a political demographic and cater to that group. The topics they choose and their interpretation of events are skewed to conform to the wants and beliefs of those in that demographic.
Television news used to be reasonably accurate, but the use of analytics that enable networks to discover who’s tuning in, enables them choose topics and skew information to appeal to particular racial, political and religious views. Their survival depends more on revenue than on accuracy. (Visit: Why is US Cable Television so politically polarized? – Intelligence and IQ )
Social Media
There is a wonderful pool of expertise available on social media like Quora, but there is also a lot of unscholarly participation. The strength of social media is that you can address questions of an everyday nature to which there are no answers on Wikipedia or other sources. You can pose a question and select from a variety of different answers, but there is usually no way to check that any particular answer is valid, unless you verify it through another information source.
Internet Information Bases
Information bases like Wikipedia and MacTutor are wonderful sources for accurate and detailed information about popular topics. However, they do not provide answers to questions such as, “How do I convert an eps file to a Tiff file using the software program Stichit.
ChatGPT
ChatGPT from Open AI is a remarkable piece of software that will address almost any problem you throw at it. For example, you can ask it to tell you the smallest prime number that is greater than 10 million. It will answer almost immediately, but there is a problem. You cannot trust that the answer is correct and you have to use another source to verify the answer.
For example, look at our conversation below:
However, when I factored 10,000,007, I found that 10,000,007, = 941 x 10627.
When I re-asked the question, I received the following response:
As you see, the two answers contradict each other. Clearly, ChatGPT has learned from its mistake, but we’re never sure if it’s correct. Therefore, I had to use a programmable calculator to check my answer, but ChatGPT told me where to look. It’s a great piece of software, but it’s still in its infancy.
