What browsing with ChatGPT taught me
There are websites out there which aren’t ready for the primitive browsing ChatGPT affords
ChatGPT plugins are how GPT-4, the LLM backing ChatGPT, pulls in information from the real world into its inferences.
If you are a ChatGPT Plus subscriber, you should have a special plugin which browses urls you supply during a chat session to add more context to the conversation.
Here’s the thing about this browser plugin.
It is essentially a headless browser which uses Selenium to interact with the given url.
Selenium, great as it is, has a limitation. It is not Javascript run time.
This means that if your page is only rendered after the client has downloaded and executed a bunch of javascript, ChatGPT is not going to be able to read your website.
You will end up with errors like this:
This is especially problematic because a lot of modern websites are Single Page Apps or a hybrid of static content hydrated with live data pulled by javascript running inside the browser.