I wish they were always a luxury, but in some situations they’re just too important to me

While I don't fully share the notion and tone of other commenter, I gotta say LLMs have absolutely tanked education and science, as noted by many and as I witnessed firsthand.

I'm a young scientist on my way to PhD, and I get to assist in a microbiology course for undergraduates.

The amount of AI slop coming from student assignments is astounding, and worse of all - they don't see it themselves. When it comes to me checking their actual knowledge, it's devastating.

And it's not just undergrads - many scientific articles also now have signs of AI slop, which messes up with research to a concerning degree.

Personally, I tried using more specialized tools like Perplexity in Research mode to look for sources, but it royally messed up listing the sources - it took actual info from scientific articles, but then referenced entirely different articles that hold no relation to it.

So, in my experience LLMs can be useful to generate a simple text or help you tie known facts together. But as a learning tool...be careful, or rather just don't use them for that. Classical education exists for a good reason, and it is that you learn to get factually correct and relevant information, analyze it and keep it in your head for future reference. It takes more time, but is ultimately much worth it.

Sure, many don’t care and I have also experienced this, but it’s a fabulous way to quickly get a glimpse at a subject, or to get started, or to learn more. It’s not always correct, but for known subjects it’s pretty good

Anything related to law or really specific subjects will be horrible though

Classical education exists for a good reason

Sure, but not everyone teaches well enough, and LLMs are one of the ways to balance this, kinda

And if you don’t understand then… yea it’s still useful as a way to avoid failing a year which is morally questionable but hey, another topic

ChatGPT chats are only public when turned into a shareable chat (which is a manually created snapshot of the chat with a link). And they only show up on search machines if you, after sharing, select the opt-in checkbox for having it show up there.

I don't know how duck.ai works, but I assume it doesn't do this.

Should we be surprised? Thinking AI, the most data hungry undertaking in existence, was not storing the data from what you write? Especially when the companies behind it are the most invasive in history? Lol what else

Plus, you explicitly have to opt into this, for each chat you share individually.

I get that it says "discoverable" at first and the search engines are in the fine print, but search engine crawlers get it anyway if it's discoverable on ChatGPT's website instead. That term is plenty clear imo.

Update 7/31/25 4:10pm PT: Hours after this article was published, OpenAI said it removed the feature from ChatGPT that allowed users to make their public conversations discoverable by search engines. The company says this was a short-lived experiment that ultimately “introduced too many opportunities for folks to accidentally share things they didn’t intend to.”

Interesting, because the checkbox is still there for me. Don't see things having changed at all, maybe they made the fine print more white? But nothing else.

In general, this reminds me of the incognito drama. Iirc people were unhappy that incognito mode didn't prevent Google websites from fingerprinting you. Which... the mode never claimed to do, it explicitly told you it didn't do that.

For chats to be discoverable through search engines, you not only have to explicitly and manually share them, you also have to then opt in to having them appear on search machines via a checkbox.

The main criticism I've seen is that the checkbox's main label only says it makes the chat "discoverable", while the search engines clarification is in the fine print. But I don't really understand how that is unclear.
Like, even if they made them discoverable through ChatGPT's website only (so no third party data sharing), Google would still get their hands on them via their crawler. This is just them skipping the middleman, the end result is the same. We'd still hear news about them appearing on Google.

This just seems to me like people clicking a checkbox based on vibes rather than critical thought of what consequences it could have and whether they want them. I don't see what can really be done against people like that.

I don't think OpenAI can be blamed for doing the data sharing, as it's opt-in, nor for the chats ending up on Google at all. If the latter was a valid complaint, it would also be valid to complain to the Lemmy devs about Lemmy posts appearing on Google. And again, I don't think the label complaint has much weight to it either, because if it's discoverable, it gets to Google one way or another.

I use DuckDuckGo.

I use local Ollama. I don't trust anyone with my AI conversations.

Alright, we generally seem to be on the same page

(Except numerous great books and helpful short materials exist for virtually any popular major, and, while they take longer to study, they provide order of magnitude better knowledge)