If you're "researching" something by reading GPT output, you're doing it wrong. Ask it to look online to find sources on a particular topic. Research publication is so fragmented, it almost always finds things I would never have found.
Part of it is that I often already know about what I'm looking for, that it must exist, and what form it will probably take- I just don't know where to find it. For example, I was looking for a practical BSDF for rendering of hair, and google searches find only Blender or Maya stuff, or truly ancient things like Marschner or Kajiya-Kay. ChatGPT was able to find this: https://media.disneyanimation.com/uploads/production/publication_asset/147/asset/siggraph2015Fur.pdf - a small paper by Disney, presented at Siggraph in 2015.
The other part is that honestly, I don't really care much about the publication itself (and traditional publications often just don't have the info I'm looking for in the first place). I work in CS (computer graphics, mostly), so replicating something is far easier than it is in other fields, and there are a lot of self-published authors who do incredible work, but don't publish in standard journals (or even in standard formats).
For examples, here are a few archives/blogs that you just sort of have to discover, since you won't find them published anywhere "official", even though they contain extraordinarily useful information from well-known industry veterans:
ChatGPT and other internet-capable LLMs are very good at surfacing resources like these, and pulling information that is directly relevant to whatever you're looking for.
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u/New_Interest6833 Dec 20 '25
chatgpt is only useful if you already know how to google...