I asked ChatGPT to recommend me some scifi books... Most recommendations where invented and don't exist

I’m possibly just vomiting something you already know here, but an important distinction is that the problem isn’t that ChatGPT is full of “incorrect data”, it’s that it is has no concept of correct or incorrect, and it doesn’t store any data in the sense we think of it.

It is a (large) language model (LLM) which does one thing, albeit incredibly well: output a token (a word or part of a word) based on the statistical probability of that token following the previous tokens, based on a statistical model generated from all the data used to train it.

It doesn’t know what a book is, nor does it have any memory of any titles of any books. It only has connections between token, scored by their statistical probability to follow each other.

It’s like a really advanced version of predictive texting, or the predictive algorithm that Google uses when you start typing a search.

If you ask it a question, it only starts to string together tokens which form an answer because the network has been trained on vast quantities of text which have a question-answer format. It doesn’t know it’s answering you, or even what a question is; it just outputs the most statistically probable token, appends it to your input, and then runs that loop.

Sometimes it outputs something accurate - perhaps because it encountered a particular book title enough times in the training data, that it is statistically probable that it will output it again; or perhaps because the title itself is statistically probable (e.g. the title “Voyage to the Stars Beyond” will be much more statistically likely than “Significantly Nine Crescent Unduly”, even if neither title actually existed in the training data.

Lots of the newer AI services put different LLMs together, along with other tools to control output and format input in a way which makes the response more predictable, or even which run a network request to look up additional data (more tokens) but the most significant part of the underlying tech is still fundamentally unable to conceptualise the notion of accuracy, let alone ensure they uphold it.

Maybe there will be another breakthrough in another area of AI research of which LLMs will form an important part, but the hype train has been running hard to categorise LLMs as AI, which is disingenuous. Theyre incredibly impressive non-intelligent automatic text generators.

"I used a hammer to screw screws and it didn't work."

ChatGPT is a generative language model. It was not built for this kind of use case, it was not ever intended for this kind of use case, and the fact that it doesn't succeed at this is like saying that it can't make you a pizza. The only logical response is "well yeah, what did you expect it to do?"

You asked for fiction so it gave you some on a whole new level.

On a more serious note, other services like bing AI chat are more suited to this. It will behave more like an assistant for this kind of query and be able to search the web for lists of highly rated scifi titles, it can also give you titles similar to something else you enjoyed.

ChatGPT is the same tech behind that but it's more closed off and unable to do those things properly. If it does spit out some good titles it'll be both a coincidence and using outdated data from whenever it was last trained.

ChatGPT is a text predictor. You are not asking it for book recommendations, you are writing "some good books are:" and hoping that glorified autocorrect will somehow come up with actual books to complete the sentence.

This effect is compounded by the fact that it is trained to predict text that will make you click the thumbs up button and not the thumbs down one. Saying "here are some books" and inventing makes you more likely to click 👍 or doing nothing, saying "as an AI language model, I do not know about books and cannot accurately recommend good books" makes you more likely to click 👎, so it doesn't do that.

Expecting chatGPT to do anything about the real world beyond writing text "creatively" is a fool's errand.

Use Bing Chat for this kind of thing, it runs on GPT-4.

They're real; they just haven't been written yet.

Yeah I’ve been noticing this lately too. It’s starting to dredge up random slapped-together information. Last week, for fun, I had it tell me the plot to an obscure N64 series I loved as a kid. I had it do this several times and even provided a full correct plot but the AI simply kept randomly putting information together and I’m not sure where much of it was coming from.

Having it generate book lists (like for learning a programming language) shows problems obvs. It would show me the same book across 4 editions, make up information about the books (unhelpful when you’re looking for a book with exercises in it), and just general…this didn’t feel like a problem a month ago. Maybe it was. I mostly use it to generate writing prompts.