Ask HN: How does ChatGPT cite its sources?

1 pointzzakli1 comment

My understanding is that generative models make things up, so how does ChatGPT reference sources in its own answer? Is Bing's ChatGPT different from the earlier version? One solution I think of is that ChatGPT will do a search and then summarises the top results to form an answer. This will also allow ChatGPT to access the latest information.

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It doesn’t. After a response, you can ask it for its sources, but it will just make stuff up.

Out of curiosity I asked it a microbiology question. It gave a reasonable but rather anodyne response. When I asked for the sources, it provided two plausibly sounding papers, with titles, authors, etc. neither of which actually exists.

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