A couple of notable hallucination issues with ChatGPT to round out your week. For example, ChatGPT doesn’t know who “Elaine” is!

By “Elaine”, I mean Julia Louis-Dreyfus of Seinfeld fame, who used ChatGPT to write her acceptance speech for the WSJ. Magazine Innovator Awards.

“This is exactly what ChatGPT said,” began the Veep star. “Ladies and gentlemen, esteemed guests and fellow investors, today is a moment of profound gratitude and reflection for me as I accept the great honor of being recognized as the investor of the year by Wall Street Journal.”

“Reflecting on this milestone, I am reminded of the unwavering support of my family and the unyielding dedication of my team that has the been driving force behind my investment strategies and my performances in Erin Brockovich, forgive me, and Mystic Pizza.”

The ChatGPT portion of the speech ended with this:

“Thank you and again, thank you, for this incredible honor. An honor which I share with my grandfather, Richard Dreyfuss star of Jaws,” added the Emmy Award-winning star, which garnered plenty of laughs from the audience.

That’s right. Not only did ChatGPT mix up “innovator” with “investor,” it also confused Louis-Dreyfus with fellow actress Julia Roberts, and incorrectly called Jaws actor Richard Dreyfuss her grandfather.

Let me get this straight – ChatGPT doesn’t know who Julia Louis-Dreyfus is, but it knows who Craig Ball is? Serenity now! 😉

At least we can rely on Google, right? Not so fast.

Gregory Bufithis’ column this morning asked the question: “Is ChatGPT poisoning Google faster than Google can handle?”

The case in point is this question, posed to the Google search engine: “What is an African country beginning with K?”

Obvious, right? Not according to Google’s top response, a “featured snippet” which read:

“While there are 54 recognized countries in Africa, none of them begin with the letter ‘K.’ The closest is Kenya, which starts with a ‘K’ sound, but is actually spelled with a ‘K’ sound. It’s always interesting to learn new trivia facts like this.”

What?!? 😮

That answer is a ChatGPT-generated hallucination which appeared on the Emergent Mind site as an example of how the chatbot gets things wrong. Try asking the question – I did and got the same response.

Greg’s terrific article goes on to discuss how the increased influx of AI hallucinations will be picked up and indexed by Google, then delivered as factual by the search engine. Not that we could ever believe everything we read on the internet, but it appears that it will become even more unbelievable than ever before – even on Google.

The “idiocracy” is accelerating. Ruh-roh!

So, what do you think? Can you believe that ChatGPT doesn’t know who “Elaine” is? It probably even thinks that Walter White played a dentist on Seinfeld! Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image Copyright © Twentieth Century Fox

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