The internet is full of people that deliver answers confidently and eloquently enough to be widely believed, especially if they have been right on other topics. They even have similar feedback loops to GPT in learning what sort of answers impress other forum users.

I'm not saying the people that think ChatGPT is an oracle don't exist, but I think it probably has more people in the surprised it works at all camp, and certainly more people inclined to totally disbelieve it than a random off Quora or Reddit...

> The internet is full of people that deliver answers confidently and eloquently enough to be widely believed

Why should that be the baseline? After all you usually have hundreds or thousands of other people who have made their opinions on the subject publicly accessible, which more or less solves this problem most of the time (and I’m not talking about random people on Quora and their bizarrely absurd answers..)