Even if all chatgpt did was save you two clicks per search, and maybe saved the time spent highlighting the portion that needs to be copied, isn't that still valuable?
Removing the attribution is a major negative, as it removes the incentive to contribute to stackoverflow. People are willing to do a lot of work for free, provided they can get credit for it.
In this particular case it didn’t save any clicks or do any highlighting that StackOverflow hadn’t already done. But even if it did save a little effort or time, which I could generally agree might have some value, I suspect it’s myopic to focus solely on the search effort. We lose something more important when AI inserts itself as the search engine; it prevents the searchers and the authors from having a conversation. Authors don’t get feedback, searchers can’t ask questions or follow up or seek out unrelated information from particularly knowledgeable or inspiring authors. I do want search to help me get to relevant and quality info, to sift out the things I wasn’t asking about, but I don’t want to trade my ability to interact with people for that or especially for slightly fewer mouse events. I’m also concerned about what happens when this starts to commodify after convincing people AI search is easier/faster… when ads and financial interests are allowed to guide the results — and that will happen — will it end up eventually being worse or harder to get true or relevant search results compared to StackOverflow or Google? Where do you go when the results don’t tell you where the information came from?
