Via LLRX – Gliding, not searching: Here’s how to reset your view of ChatGPT to steer it to better results – Human factors engineer James Intriligator makes a clear and important distinction for researchers: that unlike a search engine, with static and stored results, ChatGPT never copies, retrieves or looks up information from anywhere. Rather, it generates every word anew. You send it a prompt, and based on its machine-learning training on massive amounts of text, it creates an original answer. Most importantly, each chat retains context during a conversation, meaning that questions asked and answers provided earlier in the conversation will inform responses it generates later. The answers, therefore, are malleable, and the user needs to participate in an iterative process to shape them into something useful.