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I tried to ask it for a list of books about the urban history with their respective authors in a Table.

At first sight the result looked believable, but after looking them up, most of the books don't exist.

What was especially interesting though: For one of the books that does actually exist, it completely made up the name of the author. According to it "The City: A Global History" was written by "Thomas Kaufmann", when the author actually is Joel Kotkin.

When asking it about Thomas Kaufmann, it made up facts, like him being professor at the University of Zurich. After some research it turns out an author named "Thomas Kaufmann" does exist, but he is a professor on theology at the University of Oslo and did not write any books about urban history.

The best thing though: When I asked about books by Joel Kotkin it suddenly correctly gave me "The City: A Global History", but noted that it was co-authored by "Thomas Kaufmann".


Isn’t the point of these types of language models that they mostly model a language (to various degrees of correctness), rather than facts?


It is, it's what it states most of the time. It's also interesting that we believe what sounds right more than what is right.


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