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To be fair I also made up a citation in 11th grade to fill out the citation for an essay I had to write. This was back before it was easy to double check things online.
I love this comment. I also suspect that even if it were easy for your 11th grade teacher to check, they probably were not interested enough to do so.
Story Time: When I was in 4th grade back in the '70s, I had to write a book report: the book was a novel about astronauts traveling through space.
In my report, I lied about the plot because there was a romantic subplot between two of the astronauts... and my 4th grade brain didn't want to discuss anything so "disgusting."
I handed in my report and then spent the next two weeks in terror thinking that my teacher would read the book and realize that I lied about the plot.
Obviously, my 4th grade teacher had no interest in reading a space-travel book targeted to grade schoolers, so my lies went undetected.
I hereby apologize to Mrs. Davis for my sins.
Yes, AI Overview is a pretty weak model, but it somehow got "yes, that photo is AI" from an article explaining "not only is that photo not AI, here is the reporter who took the photo."
The other thing is that it is often hard to tell whether a model is talking about a source because the surrounding system has run a search and injected it into the prompt, or whether it's just freestyling based on its training data.
They absolutely cannot correctly cite sources otherwise.
https://chatgpt.com/share/6902aed2-f0ac-8001-91c0-77090ab75f...
Cites around 20 sources, with https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/ being the one surfaced in the text.
Point being: no you cannot trust it withput double checking its information from elsewhere. Same as with anything else.
I like that you read all the citations in your concrete example of how good chat gpt is at citations and chose not to mention that one of them was made up.
Like you either would have seen it and consciously chose not to disclose that information or you asked a bot a question, got a response that seemed right, and then trusted that the sources were correct and posted it. But there’s no chance of the latter happening though because you specifically just stated that that’s not how you use language models.
On an unrelated note what are your thoughts on people using plausible-sounding LLM-generated garbage text backed by fake citations to lend credibility to their existing opinions as an existential threat to the concept of truth or authoritativeness on the internet?
This tooks have limitations. Sooner we accept it,sooner we learn to better use them.
Says “Page Not Found”. From a technical standpoint how do you think that happened? Personally I think it is either the result of a hallucination or the chat bot actually did a web search, found a valid page, and then modified the URL in such a way that broke it before sending it to you.
The ideal LLM is a search engine that just copies and pastes verbatim what the source says instead of trying to be clever about it.