Idk if I said this before but programs like ChatGPT do NOT answer the questions you give them. What they DO is responding with what an answer to that question could sound like based on a set of pattern recognition.

These programs are not search engines, they're just advanced forms of auto-complete.

Also: it doesn't even have any Internet access https://simonwillison.net/2023/Mar/10/chatgpt-internet-access/

ChatGPT can’t access the internet, even though it really looks like it can

A really common misconception about ChatGPT is that it can access URLs. I’ve seen many different examples of people pasting in a URL and asking for a summary, or asking …

Oh boi this is doing numbers
@Drunkonhugs I agree with your point, although I've noticed that it tends to be people playing stupid games that win stupid prizes.
@Drunkonhugs Maybe we need to build more disclaimers on the bot since it doesn't seem to know it can't use the internet.
@Drunkonhugs can you define a search algorithm? What distinguishes it from how auto-complete works?

@Qbitzerre I'm not a computer scientist, smarter people than me have talked about this.

But basically it just puts together sentences one word at a time based on the patterns it recognizes. Like, if you ask it to tell a joke it will arrange words in a matter that resemble the format but not the meaning.
Then of course there's the fact that it isn't hooked up to the internet so even if it had the ability to look things up based on meaning it couldn't

@Drunkonhugs a famous computer scientist long ago was asked whether he thought a computer could think. He said the question didn't interest him; it was like asking if a submarine could swim.

I do know a bit about algorithms and ML too. I see little reason to believe that the human brain is qualitatively different functionally. It's just a matter of scale.

I can't be confident that any display of intelligence or what we loftily call creativity is much more than regurgitation.

@Qbitzerre sure, in the future that's very likely.

I was just talking about people who mistake chatbots for google