Serendipity and ChatGPT

Serendipity: the fact of finding something valuable or interesting by accident or something pleasant happening by chance

ChatGPT & other LLMs have a tendency to take you to the answer. Although the terseness is nice, appreciated and clearly needed sometimes, especially in a world where engagement metrics are eating into quality and tightly-knit content. Jumping around and finding answers sometimes does help.

Jumping around the inter-webs also leads to different questions, auxiliary discussions, historic conversations & beautifully composed blog posts.

Sometimes we discover new websites to refer from, start hopping from one link to another and go into an alluring rabbit hole. Start reading about something entirely different and discover a new field or learn about new ideas. ChatGPT seems to engineer out the Serendipity.

I think the solution to this is to use an LLM model preferably when there is a time constraint and Serendipity is avoided in favor of time. But otherwise, my recommendation is to jump around the web and discover the beauty of it.

A lot of technology seems to minimize or eliminate effort, and in the process also eliminate Serendipity. What if we engineer for serendipity instead?