Some of the more technical commentators now refer to Chat GPT as being merely “spicy autocomplete” which is a pretty on-the-nose description.

Which doesn’t stop it from being a useful tool for certain applications and a threat in other areas but it’s nowhere near ‘smart’ - it just rubs something plausible sounding from the huge corpus of writing and comments it’s been fed. A lot of the time for things like actual figures it just plain guesses.

Sadly overall people won’t.

Or at least they may somewhat … apart from the misinformation that happens to agree with their personal politics, preconceptions and prejudices.

I find myself questioning whether it’s worthwhile even engaging in gun control threads any more. If the horrors of Sandy Hook and Uvalde didn’t change peoples minds nothing anyone can say is going to change opinions.

We all know the script - the pro gun people will turn up in the thread with tedious inevitability with all the usual talking points and strawmen to knock down, upvoting each other and downvoting anyone who disagrees.

And nothing changes. And then tomorrow or next week there’s another dead or injured kid or another mass shooting and the ‘debate’ begins anew …