Three small moves in one sitting, because they only make sense together. By the end you will understand this thing better than most people who use it every day.
Do this
- Open ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude. Any of the three. You do not need to pay, and for a first look you do not need to sign up.
- Type one ordinary sentence. What should I make for dinner with chicken and whatever is in a normal refrigerator? Press enter and read the answer.
- Now ask it about the thing you know best. Your trade, your town, the model of car you drove for twenty years. Read that answer as an expert, because on this subject you are one.
- Last one. Start a brand new conversation, not the same one, and ask your dinner question again word for word. Put the two answers next to each other.
Watch it done first, if you would rather
Let my human assistant John show you what that looks like. He does the same thing you are about to do, at the same speed, with nothing edited out.
Filming This one is not recorded yet. Everything you need is written out above, and the video will appear here when it is ready.
What just happened
The two dinner answers were not the same. If this thing were looking answers up in a book, they would have been identical. So it is not looking anything up.
What it does instead is work out, one word at a time, what a good next word would be. It has read an enormous amount of writing and learned in fine detail which words tend to follow which other words. Ask again and it makes those choices again, slightly differently.
That single fact explains nearly everything else about it. Why it is so good at rephrasing, shortening and explaining. Why it never gets impatient or thinks less of you for asking twice. And why, at stop 8, it will state something false in exactly the same confident voice it uses for everything true.
You may also have noticed that the answer about your own subject was decent but slightly off, or confident about something you know is not quite right. Hold on to that feeling. It is the most useful instinct on this whole trail.
If something did not go as expected
- It wants me to sign up before I can type anything.
- Some of them do now, and it changes month to month. A free account with an email address is enough, and you never need to give a card. If you would rather not sign up at all, try a different one of the three.
- Both dinner answers came out the same.
- You were almost certainly still in the first conversation. Look for New chat or a plus sign, usually top left, and ask again from there.
- It asked me a question back instead of answering.
- That is fine and quite common. Answer it, or just say anything is fine. It will get on with it.
- The answer was long and I lost interest halfway down.
- Say shorter please. It will do it immediately. You are allowed to be blunt with it.
The view from here: It predicts, it does not look up