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This is a bizarre problem I’ve noticed with ChatGPT. It will literally just make up links and quotations sometimes. I will ask it for authoritative quotations from so and so regarding such topic, and a lot of the quotations would be made up. Maybe because I’m using the free version? But it shouldn’t be hard to force the AI to specifically only trawl through academic works, peer reviewed papers, etc.
There's a ton of answers already, some bad some good, but the core technical issue is that ChatGPT just doesn't do retrieval. It has memorized precisely some strings, so it will regurgitate them verbatim with high probability, but for the most part it has learned to interpolate in the space of features of the training data. This enables impressive creativity, what looks like perfect command of English, and some not exactly trivial reasoning. This also makes it a terrible lawyer's assistant. It doesn't know these cases, it knows what a case like this would look like, and it's piss poor at saying «I don't know». Teaching it to say that when, and only when it really doesn't is an open problem.
To mitigate the immediate issue of hallucinations, we can finetune models on the problem domain, and we can build retrieval-, search- and generally tool-augmented LLMs. In the last two years there have been tons of increasingly promising ideas for how best to do it, for example this one.
As a heavy ChatGPT user, I don’t want it to ever say "I don’t know". I want it to produce the best answer it’s capable of, and then I’ll sanity check the answer anyway.
Well, I want it to say that. I also want people to say that more often. If it doesn't know truth, I don't need some made-up nonsense instead. Least of all I need authoritative confident nonsense, it actually drives me mad.
ChatGPT unlike a human is not inherently capable of discerning what it does or doesnt know. By filtering out low confidence answers, you’d be trading away something it’s really good at — suggesting ideas for solving hard problems without flinching, for something that it’s not going to do well anyway. Just double-check the answers.
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