I don't understand how ChatGPT (or similar interactive agents) function, so I'm very confused by your experience. Was ChatGPT just a replacement for internet searches (e.g. instead of searching for a spec sheet for your model microphone, you asked the bot "what is the <spec> for <model> microphone?")? Or was ChatGPT doing the debugging with you just providing data from the real world?
Well, for instance, I had two microphones, an Audio Technical AT4040 and an Audio Technical AE5400, and I wasn't sure which I preferred to use as a vocal mic while I am playing piano. I asked it to compare and contrast. It was very helpful. I double-checked the results, but even with that, it was still much faster and less painful than doing two separate google searches dealing with ads. I went through the same exercise with all my other mics, too.
It also gave me advice on how to mic an upright bass when playing live in a room with other players. I consider its advice superior to advice I had earlier received from discussion boards. It also gave me microphone recommendations that I can research.
I also described a scenario of how my Focusrite Clarett8pre wasn't sending sounds to my headphones until I also turned on my Profile 2626, which is connected via optical ADAT cables. It told me that it sounded like the connection between the two was impeding the Focusrite's ability to route the inputs to my headphone mix, and to check Focusrite Control to see how the routing was defined. It wasn't a complete answer, but it put me on the right track.
For me it's a mix of internet searches with an expert system you can interact with in natural language.
So while before you'd simply type "my microphone is broken and I hear hissing noises" and pray Google had the answer to a more or less exact match for your question, now you type the same and ChatGPT can tell you possible causes. But then you refine your question "no, I tried this and that's not it. My mike brand is X, and it's a bit dusty. Anything else I should try?". New answer by ChatGPT. "No, I tried that and that's not it. But now I remember my dog bit it, is dog saliva bad for the mike?", and so on and so forth.
And it can do magic that Google cannot. Say you ask for a snipper of code in Java. Then you realize you want to see the solution in Python. "Please rewrite the code you just generated but in Python" -- and voilà!
I assume the OP is leaving out the part about something called prompt engineering which has a bit of a learning curve. I'm going to have to dive in to it myself, as it seems like a bit of self-education is required before it can be simply communicated.
I didn't do anything special prompt-related, I just asked the same way I would ask on a discussion board.
I wondered though if it was especially effective because information on sound hardware is one of those subjects that probably has a huge corpus. Lots of people ask redundant questions about their gear, so accurate information is probably well-correlated in some sense.
In contrast, I wrote three fiction chapters about a group of people on a shared quest of sorts. I tried to get ChatGPT to read those and summarize one of the characters across the three chapters, and it hallucinated like crazy. That's probably something where I need to learn some prompt engineering, or maybe it just isn't supposed to work well.
I've used it for the exact same thing I would have used StackOverflow for 6 months ago. Stuck on a specific coding problem, pulling out my hair, decided to go ask on StackOverflow but stopped and asked ChatGPT instead. Got a solution, and didn't need to wait a couple hours for the answer.
