Reckons substituting for answers

Matt Jones ponders what ChatGPT is providing:

That Google was “late to market” with a ChatGPT competitor is a feature not a bug as far as I’m concerned. It shouldn’t be treated as an answer machine.

It’s a reckon machine.

And most people outside of the tech industry hypetariat should worry about that.

[…]

The impact of a search engine’s results on societies that treat them as scaffolding are the real problem…

The linked post explains what the term “reckon machine” signifies in this context, as well as suggesting ¹ a path to the UK developing “a adversarial critical network to root out LLMs’ fibs” that could “[rocket] it back to relevance.”

[Via Magical Nihilism]