[gwervc]

This is in a way very good, as it will be another differentiator between smart people and others: average Joe will indulge himself in hallucinations while a few will retain the knowledge of querying a search engine, citing a source and critically think of what they read.

[sandspar]

I assume you see yourself as one of the special few, much better than those average Joe's.

[zamadatix]

You can do things "the right way" (find sources, critically think about the info) in either (or other things like books), the common denominator is the person using the tool not going off the first thing they read from the tool as gospel.

[PodgieTar]

I don't know how fully I agree with this, to be honest. Or, yes, I do - but we obviously outsource a lot to the tools we use. Rightly or wrongly we expect our search engines to source good sources and high quality information. And that has been sort of inbred into people through years of internet use.

Degrading the quality of the output of tools that were once considered reliable and safe is going to create problems, and the onus is not fully on the people using those tools, but on those creating them.

[zamadatix]

Is that really unique to search engines vs every tool before and after them though?