What's the difference between Googling diseases/symptoms and asking ChatGPT?

henrebotha · 2026-01-08T14:47:01 1767883621

An opaque layer of transformation.

The former shows you things people (hopefully) have written.

The latter shows you a made-up string of text "inspired by" things people have written.

Lio · 2026-01-08T12:06:23 1767873983

That's a good question. I guess it could be depth of discussion but in the end they both come down to trust.

I guess unless you have an offline system you are at the mercy of whoever is running the services you use.

alt227 · 2026-01-08T15:14:40 1767885280

Googling and reading yourself allows you to assess and compare sources, and apply critical thinking and reasoning specific to yourself and your own condition. Using AI takes all this control away from you and trusts a machine to do the reasoning and assessing, which may be based on huge amounts of data which differ from yourself.

Googling allows you to choose the sources you trust, AI forces you to trust it as a source.