I don't have any chatbot service subscription so I chose "No, I haven't tried". But nearly all of my google or duckduckgo searches now display an AI overview. It's basically always wrong.

I try to keep an open mind towards new technology, but the current AI craze I don't understand. I'm a programmer and I've been doing "AI" since the 90's. I've also used ML in things like image recognition, translation and speech synthesis.

I've read multiple books on artificial intelligence such as "Behind Deep Blue" and of course "Gödel, Escher, Bach". I think Hofstadter is spot on that the paradox of self-reference is present everywhere.

I hear a lot of people say that you need to learn how to use a chatbot. It's a skill and the answers improve as your prompts get better. Well, yeah, this is self-reference in play if I've ever seen it. My problem is that the effort spent on improving the input to the chatbot might as well be spent on proper research into the topic.

For asking simple questions where I can easily spot the wrong answer it's fine. However, when I'm doing coding, I need to understand the code and code written by an LLM can't be trusted. I've also seen some of the answers Gemini returns when I've asked some medical questions and it's horrifying to be quite honest.