This is your periodic reminder that AI-powered chatbots still make up things and lie with all the confidence of a GPS system telling you that the shortest way home is to drive through the lake. My reminder comes courtesy of Nieman Lab, which ran an experiment to see if ChatGPT would provide correct links to articles from news publications it pays millions of dollars to. It turns out that ChatGPT does not. Instead, it confidently makes up entire URLs, a phenomenon that the AI industry calls "hallucinating," a term that seems more apt for a real person high on their own bullshit. Nieman Lab's Andrew Deck asked the service to provide links to high-profile, exclusive stories published by 10 publishers that OpenAI has struck deals worth millions of dollars with. These included the Associated Press, The Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, The Times (UK), Le Monde, El País, The Atlantic, The Verge, Vox, and Politico.

My task for our AI overlords was simple: help me crack the New York Times Spelling Bee. I had spent a large chunk of a Saturday evening trying to shape the letters G, Y, A, L, P, O and N into as many words as possible. But three hours, 141 points and 37 words -- including "nonapology", "lagoon" and "analogy" -- later, I had hit a wall. A few more words was all I needed to propel myself into Spelling Bee's "genius" echelon, the title reserved for those who unscramble 70 percent of all possible words using the given letters, and the point at which the puzzle considers itself, effectively, solved. My human mind was clearly struggling, but this task seemed like child's play for AI, so I fired up ChatGPT, told it I was trying to win the Spelling Bee, gave it my letters and laid out the rules.