[Software] ChatGPT still can't beat YouTube when it comes to getting answers

[-Sn!PeR-]

 

Generative AI stands ready to summarize, ideate, assist, and answer almost any question, but the true test of its seemingly unlimited capabilities is whether it can beat the answer OG: YouTube.

Spoiler alert: it can't

When you become an adult, there are certain skills you can or should learn. Cooking, cleaning your home, grocery shopping, minor home or apartment repairs, and basic car maintenance. As a long-time adult, I can handle most if not all these tasks, even car upkeep. However, there's one task, however that I tackle with trepidation: jumpstarting a car. Weirdly, I've had to do it multiple times in the last year, most recently when my son's car died.

Jumpstarting a dead car entails running a pair of unwieldy jumper cables from one fully charged car battery to the flat battery. A typical car battery is 12V, but it has enough amperage to zap you unconscious or worse. Even though I've done this at least a dozen times over the years, I find it hard to tell the positive terminal from the negative terminals (mostly because car batteries are so dirty you usually can't see plus or minus labels or the terminal color coding). More importantly, one jumper clamp should not be attached to the terminal and instead, for safety, should be clamped onto some metal part of the dead car as a ground.

 

 

Since my memory is faulty and this is an inherently dangerous task (these acid-filled batteries can also explode), I usually open YouTube and search 'How to jumpstart a car'. There are dozens of related queries, and a lot of videos that provide step-by-step visual guidance. I play them and pause as I complete each step. It's pretty foolproof.

With my son's car sitting dead on the street, I pondered a different path. We're in the age of AI, after all, so why not let ChatGPT 4o give it a try? Instead of playing a video, I might get clearer text instructions, and perhaps even a diagram that I could save and reuse the next time one of us leaves the interior car light on.

 

Help me help you

 

In the prompt field, I typed in 'How to safely jumpstart a car',  and within seconds I had excellent, detailed instructions. It hit all the key points, including attaching one end of the jumper cables to an unfinished piece of metal on the dead car. There were even extra safety instructions. ChatGPT 4o didn't note its sources, but the information is so ubiquitous that I have to assume it came from multiple uncredited experts.

 

https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-still-cant-beat-youtube-when-it-comes-to-getting-answers