More confident lies by ChatGPT...

[Dien Rice]

A few days ago, I was exploring the "hallucinations" (i.e. lies) that ChatGPT will spit out... It often does this when asked about quite specialized knowledge...

If you don't know the topic (or research it afterwards), you're likely to be taken in by a ChatGPT lie!

Here's one...

I just entered... "Richard Feynman wrote a detective story"...

(Richard Feynman was a famous Nobel Prize-winning physicist...)

ChatGPT replied (in part)...

"Yes, Richard Feynman, the renowned physicist and Nobel laureate, wrote a detective story called 'The Case of the Missing Neutrinos.'

"The story was published in a collection of Feynman's writings titled 'The Pleasure of Finding Things Out.' It tells the story of a group of physicists who are trying to figure out why a certain experiment is not producing the results they expect. As they investigate, they discover that some of the neutrinos that should be present in the experiment seem to be missing, and they must work to solve the mystery."

This all sounds very plausible... Until...

You actually look up the Table of Contents of Richard Feynman's book, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out."

There is NO chapter called "The Case of the Missing Neutrinos!"

Then... you can do an online search for "The Case of the Missing Neutrinos"... and you find...

Another physicist, John Gribbin, wrote a book called...

"Case of the Missing Neutrinos And Other Curious Phenomena of the Universe"...

ChatGPT flat out told a lie. It combined a fact about Richard Feynman (that he wrote the book, "The Pleasure of Finding Things Out"), with another fact about a different physicist, John Gribbin (that he wrote "The Case of the Missing Neutrinos")... and attributed it all to Feynman!

But it sounded oh so plausible...!

(In fact, I was initially "taken in" and quite impressed... Until I did my own "fact checking!")

Best wishes,

Dien