Using ChatGPT and phrasing it like a search seems like a better way? “Can you find documentation about an API that does X?”
If you ask for a link, it may hallucinate the link.
And unlike a search engine where someone had to previously think of, and then make some page with the fake content on it, it will happily make it up on the fly so you'll end up with a new/unique bit of fake documentation/url!
At that point, you would have been way better off just... using a search engine?
Which would certainly explain things like hallucinated references in legal docs and papers!
The reality is that for a human to make up that much bullshit requires a decent amount of work, so most humans don’t do it - or can’t do it as convincingly. LLMs can generate nigh infinite amounts of bullshit for cheap (and often more convincing sounding bullshit than a human can do on their own without a lot of work!), making them perfect for fooling people.
Unless someone is really good at double checking things, it’s a recipe for disaster. Even worse, doing the right amount of double checking makings them often even more exhausting than just doing the work yourself in the first place.
One time I tried to use Gemini to figure out 1950s construction techniques so I could understand how my house was built. It made a dubious sounding claim about the foundation, so I had it give me links and keywords so I could find some primary sources myself. I was unable to find anything to back up what it told me, and then it doubled down and told me that either I was googling wrong or that what it told me was a historical “hack” that wouldn’t have been documented.
These were both recent and with the latest models, so maybe they don’t fully fabricate links, but they do hallucinate the contents frequently.
Grok certainly will (at least as of a couple months ago). And they weren't just stale links either.