I have noticed something about my use of AI in the past few months. I often ask it things that I think I already know the answer to.
This isn’t just to waste time, but to double check if I was right or if there was something more that I could learn on that particular issue. In the past I would have done a quick google search and then spend maybe a half hour confirming the answer from an authoritative source. Now if the answer seems reasonable I will cross check it with another AI or asking a different way, and then accept it.
AI has lowered my research of different sources in some ways and increased it in others. In some searches it provides content from websites that I would never have visited that are authorative but I didn’t know it. Many times with AI research I click on the URL links and find high quality authorative links to sites that I never knew existed.
To me AI is a different kind of search engine and better than Google search. I don’t like Google which makes it particularly irksome that I really like Gemini. I like it more than the testing I do every few months with ChatGPT, Claude and others. I think ChatGPT has the weight of people who are lazy and don’t want to test something better. I think Claude tries to appear useful, but doesn’t have the ability to make reliable conclusions. Gemini still wants to state things that are just its guesses as facts, so I have to always be aware of that and ask it for the sources. It forgets to include sources. If you have an AI answer and no sources, don’t believe it.
But for work and personal life, Gemini has done great for me. It sometimes gets things wrong but that is my fault in not vetting the answers more closely. As it improves then I can trust it more. Right now I don’t trust it at all. Perhaps that will change in the future. I think there are too many assumptions and that doesn’t help anyone.
So is using AI a waste of time? Yes/No. It saves me time compared to a google search, but then I also think of things that in the past wouldn’t rise to the level of enough curiosity to spend the energy to search Google. So I will do an AI search but mostly I already know the answer just want to see if there are any new developments in that area. Is that a waste of time? Maybe. Do I know all kinds of things I wouldn’t know without AI sure. Are those things that help me in my job/life? Maybe. Is the tradeoff of energy/time/money worth it? Maybe. The older I get the less certain that facts seem to me. It seems to me that life is more about emotional and spiritual acceptance and peace than knowing things. I know my younger self would find this answer confusing, but it does seem to be true.