How I Use ChatGPT as an Intuition Engine
This approach works best as a complement to Google
I don’t use AI to write. I use it as an intuition engine.
A search engine like Google needs the exact query to find the right information. It acts as a web librarian. It knows where all the books are but without a title or the author’s name, it can’t help you. You can’t ask “What’s an old book about a guy who kills a woman and then regrets it?” and expect the right answer.
Google gives me the Highland Knights Series by Jennifer Haymore and The Collected Regrets Of Clover by Mikki Brammer. Both wrong.
ChatGPT gets it:
That’s what an intuition engine does best for me. It provides a likely answer to my unprecise query. It won’t always get it right (that’s why it’s just intuition and not telepathy) but it accepts a much wider range of queries than Google.1 However, the secret to this approach is the uncanny synergy between intuition and search engines.
It’s not one or the other. It’s both together.
ChatGPT can’t search like Google (it doesn’t provide the entire pool of links for me to choose) and may fail to give me the right answer. But it can narrow down the area of possible answers even if my original query is clumsy. An intuition engine acts as a query translator, as a pointer to a better query. From there, I can use Google to check whether ChatGPT’s answer is what I want and search for it.2
ChatGPT complements Google like flexibility does precision. They’re coach and librarian.
It’s intuition-powered search.
Why try to replace search engines? It won’t work! Don’t forget that generative AI’s hallucinatory nature is not a problem to be solved but an intrinsic feature of how it works. ChatGPT can’t search like Google does—but it shows you the way.
It even works when I don’t know what I’m looking for.
Let me show you a real example.