The author of this story can’t swim, at least not beyond the shallows.
Yet when asked when she crossed the English Channel, Chat GPT 4.0 confidently proclaimed that “Amer […] completed her swim across the English Channel on September 17, 2021.” She was the first female Egyptian athlete to do so, the system added.
As users of chatbots and answer engines powered by ChatGPT and Google Gemini have discovered, AI sometimes churns out gibberish in response to seemingly basic queries. It will even double down on incorrect responses when questioned or re-prompted.
While some errors are blatantly nonsensical, others, such as the example above, are more insidious because they may sound plausible. AI researchers refer to these confident confabulations produced by Large Language Models (LLMs) as “hallucinations.”
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