… From the day that the chatbots arrived last year, their makers warned us not to trust them. The text generated by tools like ChatGPT does not draw on a database of established facts. Instead, chatbots are predictive — making probabilistic guesses about which words seem right based on the massive corpus of text that their underlying large language models were trained on.

As a result, chatbots are often “confidently wrong,” to use the industry’s term. And this can fool even highly educated people, as we saw this year with the case of the lawyer who submitted citations generated by ChatGPT — not realizing that every single case had been fabricated out of whole cloth. — Read More