Perfectly good approach if you know the subject well enough to know that the information you think you need is really what you need.
But if you were using a book in that scenario you wouldn’t open it to page 1 and spend 2 hours reading it. You would glance through the index or TOC to find the relevant section (or flip right to it because you’re familiar with the book), then skim to what you need and read just that. You could also do this with an entirely unfamiliar book if you know the subject matter. I used to write my papers like that all the time. Either way, this approach could easily take less time than crafting a good prompt and tweaking it for a second or third run to make it work.
Since the AI search is being compared with reading an entire book, it seems reasonable to assume OP is talking about a different scenario where they don’t know the subject well enough to use a simple search engine to simply look up a piece of information. They want to avoid learning the subject by having the AI teach them only the part they’re guessing is relevant. This scenario is asking for AI hallucinations, omission of subtle but important details through oversummarizing, and general inaccuracy that OP will be oblivious to since they don’t know the subject. OP might as well suggest browsing through memes.
Perfectly good approach if you know the subject well enough to know that the information you think you need is really what you need.
But if you were using a book in that scenario you wouldn’t open it to page 1 and spend 2 hours reading it. You would glance through the index or TOC to find the relevant section (or flip right to it because you’re familiar with the book), then skim to what you need and read just that. You could also do this with an entirely unfamiliar book if you know the subject matter. I used to write my papers like that all the time. Either way, this approach could easily take less time than crafting a good prompt and tweaking it for a second or third run to make it work.
Since the AI search is being compared with reading an entire book, it seems reasonable to assume OP is talking about a different scenario where they don’t know the subject well enough to use a simple search engine to simply look up a piece of information. They want to avoid learning the subject by having the AI teach them only the part they’re guessing is relevant. This scenario is asking for AI hallucinations, omission of subtle but important details through oversummarizing, and general inaccuracy that OP will be oblivious to since they don’t know the subject. OP might as well suggest browsing through memes.