Chatbots May ‘Hallucinate’ More Often Than Many Realize
When the San Francisco start-up OpenAI unveiled its ChatGPT online chatbot late last year, millions were wowed by the humanlike way it answered questions, wrote poetry and discussed almost any topic. But most people were slow to realize that this new kind of chatbot often makes things up.
When Google introduced a similar chatbot several weeks later, it spewed nonsense about the James Webb telescope. The next day, Microsoft’s new Bing chatbot offered up all sorts of bogus information about the Gap, Mexican nightlife and the singer Billie Eilish. Then, in March, ChatGPT cited a half dozen fake court cases while writing a 10-page legal brief that a lawyer submitted to a federal judge in Manhattan.
Now a new start-up called Vectara, founded by former Google employees, is trying to figure out how often chatbots veer from the truth. The company’s research estimates that even in situations designed to
