Ran into something funny today. I asked ChatGPT (v4) to read a particular web page and extract the data into a simple markdown structure:
Its response was uncharacteristically oblivious to my request:
Notably, it clearly did not access the website – there was no moment that it switched into a “Browsing...” state.
My theory was that I had triggered some sort of cache. I linked it to a URL it's probably seen before. I’m assuming web browsing is expensive and therefore something it tries to avoid.
What’s funny is that it clearly didn’t cache the page, but instead cached its response to the page (way cheaper!)
Dropping a URL in does not automatically shut its faculties off:
It seems like the kill switch is when I ask it to perform an operation on the URL!
It really doesn’t want to access the page. When I tell it to check the page again, it clearly doesn’t access the page (the word “checkbox” does indeed appear on the page):
However, it did cheekily name our conversation “Crear Objectos Personalizados”, which is just delightful:
To confirm my theory, I tried something else: I saved the webpage as a PDF, then uploaded the PDF to ChatGPT. That worked just fine:
