I asked #chatgpt to write me an essay, with citations, about a scientific topic I know very well (bat crawling behaviour). It wrote a bad essay that didn’t really say much, but cited two papers with which I wasn’t familiar, in very good journals. I was freaked out! How did I not know those papers?
Turns out, chatgpt just made them up. The papers don’t exist. That’s a handy thing to know.
@riskindan we have run a few tests like this and the most common pattern appears to be “sometimes real journal/always made up paper”. The broader (ie less niche) the original prompt, the more likely it is able to pull real journal titles. It was sort of fascinating.