Tell HN: ChatGPT is freaking amazing and I don't get the negativity

5 points by Red_Tarsius 221 days ago | 6 comments

tl;dr: I love AI chatbots because they allow you to look up the web without any intrusive content.

ChatGPT has become my favorite way to search through the web. It redefined the way I engage with the internet: the www is the content, traditional search engines are the shelves & aisles, and the chatbot is the librarian.

It's a shame that so much debate revolves around validating our preconceived fears. So many people are looking for one gotcha to dismiss AI altogether. If you use a default chatbot to draft your meal plans or to answer math questions, you're setting it up for failure. Its strength lies in the ability to map natural language to the data used in its training. In a way, AI is the pinnacle of user interface: it demands nothing more from the user than the ability to speak or write.

I tried to list the reasons as to why I like it so much:

- The relationship between a chatbot and its user is transparent: you know you're dealing with generated content in advance. Many other online services have devolved into a murky territory where you never quite know whether you're dealing with users, bots and/or shills.

- Asking something to the chatbot filters out all ads and sponsored content I might have seen on my way to the answer. Next time you google something, count all the ads you see from the search result page until you reach what you are looking for. It's like walking through the forced-path layout of a mall.

- The response of the chatbot is mostly devoid of images. If you want to be shown something, you need to ask for it. This is very different from the act of browsing, where the average user is ONE typo, ONE click or ONE scroll away from traumatic material.

- No more sidebars, recommended links or elements poking from outside the viewport! As someone with compulsive issues, the lack of clutter is chef's kiss.

I would like to read your thoughts on the matter. Imho in a few years we'll look back at old-school "browsing" and wonder how the heck we managed to find anything useful online. We're living in a Goldilocks time where AI chatbots are amazing search assistants and they have yet to be tarnished by sponsored content. Let's enjoy it while we can.

b3ing 221 days ago |

Sure it’s great the way it is now, if it’s free, but at some point it’s gonna change because it needs to make more money and I don’t think subscriptions are gonna be enough, so it’ll probably be embedded ads inside of it and then there’s an issue that it’s scraped and ripped off the entire web without permission and pirated books and scrape those as well. I’ll look forward to the day when you can run AI on your own computer no ads, 100% percent open source because it’s all based on stolen data.

vunderba 221 days ago |

> So many people are looking for one gotcha to dismiss AI altogether.

That might say more about your own social circle. Most of my friends take a pretty measured approach to AI.

> The relationship between a chatbot and its user is transparent.

Is it? Depending on the LLM you are using, there might be quite a bit of alignment that's built into the natural bias of the model, and that's not even taking into account the usually massive system prompt that's automatically injected into the context window. Your average non-techie is simply going to be unaware of this.

> We're living in a Goldilocks time where AI chatbots are amazing search assistants and they have yet to be tarnished by sponsored content.

https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/why-we-re-experimenting-w...

JohnFen 220 days ago |

I haven't found LLMs to be all that useful for searching the web, but I suspect that how useful it is depends on what you're searching for.

I'm rarely searching to find an answer to a specific question, I'm more usually searching in order to do research. What I want from the search is a list of online resources on the topic I'm researching. That's what web searches give me.

If I were looking for a specific answer on a topic I already know well enough to be able to spot errors, LLMs may be very useful. But that's just not what I'm usually doing.

byko3y 221 days ago |

My firefox automatically installed perplexity search engine — it's actually much better in for just searching the web. Or use Grok. If you need to generate content there are lots of better AI-s which do not limit request rate as heavily: gemini, deepseek, qwen. If you need to write and refactor code, Claude is the best one I've met — but it's mediocre at pretty much anything else. I stopped using ChatGPT after summer 2025 incident with response quality plummeting. It was average LLM before that incident, but afterwards there was really no reason to get back to ChatGPT again for me.

bigyabai 221 days ago | |

Have you used it to write any blog posts, lately?

byko3y 221 days ago | | |

Funny question, considering the fact I've posted a link to my recent article onto the main page. I employ LLM-s a lot.

Few days ago I made an experiment — put my article into Qwen and asked to evaluate it for LLM-generated content. To my amazement it told me the article is 70-90% AI-generated. Which is even more weird considering the fact I know I wrote it all top to bottom. I think I spend so much time in LLM conversations I actually started copying LLM style.

I mean if you look into the article https://bykozy.me/blog/rust-is-a-disappointment/ — it's structured exactly like LLM implicit templates (a.k.a. fine tuning training datasets) do: short reiteration of the question, list of key points, key points explained exactly one by one, final summary. However, why would I not write the article this way? Just to make sure a person skimming the article would not pattern-match it to "formatted as LLM output"?

If I wanted to disguise an AI-generated article as a 100% human content — I would do it. But thanks for the suggestion — might be viable to consider doing so, because I just scare too many people away this way.