Jonathan May, University of Southern California It doesn’t take much to get ChatGPT to make a factual mistake. My son is doing a report on U.S. presidents, so I figured I’d help him out by looking up a few biographies. I tried asking for a list of books about Abraham Lincoln and it did a pretty good job: A reasonable list of books about Lincoln. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND Number 4 isn’t right. Garry Wills famously wrote “Lincoln at Gettysburg,” and Lincoln himself wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, of course, but it’s not a bad start. Then I…

It doesn't take much to get ChatGPT to make a factual mistake. My son is doing a report on US presidents, so I figured I'd help him out by looking up a few biographies. Garry Wills famously wrote "Lincoln at Gettysburg," and Lincoln himself wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, of course, but it's not a bad start. Then I tried something harder, asking instead about the much more obscure William Henry Harrison, and it gamely provided a list, nearly all of which was wrong. Numbers 4 and 5 are correct; the rest don't exist or are not authored by those people.

It doesn't take much to get ChatGPT to make a factual mistake. My son is doing a report on U.S. presidents, so I figured I'd help him out by looking up a few biographies. Garry Wills famously wrote "Lincoln at Gettysburg," and Lincoln himself wrote the Emancipation Proclamation, of course, but it's not a bad start. Then I tried something harder, asking instead about the much more obscure William Henry Harrison, and it gamely provided a list, nearly all of which was wrong. Books about Harrison, fewer than half of which are correct.