AI Fatigue Revisited
Back in mid-June, I decided to try to stop using ChatGPT so much for solving my problems. Instead I'd just go old-school Google searches and see where it landed me. I was unhappy, see, with the general results of ChatGPT since I could never fully trust it despite how confident it seemed.
And ChatGPT 5, recently released, doesn't seem to be a heckuva lot better on that front.
In any case, around the end of June, I canceled my ChatGPT subscription. And it's still canceled.
I use a classic search for what I need to find. I do not, however, use Google since it's SEO crap. I pay for Kagi, instead, and it seems to work considerably better.
Result: things generally work! One-offs that I would have punted to LLMs (e.g. ".htaccess file to force downloads of certain file extensions") I still get a quick answer to with a standard search.
As for the "un-Googleable", I do still sometimes punt to AI to get some leads. But it's rare enough that I'm completely fitting in the free GPT tier. Not only that, but on Kagi if you end your query with a question mark, it feeds it to an LLM. So I still have it there if I need it.
Finally, I feel generally better. I was feeling kinda dumb, for lack of a better word, constantly punting to an LLM, like I was the one who was just a machine. There's something to be said for the struggle of doing your own thinking.
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