Earlier I posted about using ChatGPT's propensity to fabricate citations entirely as a short-term strategy for detecting journal submissions and classroom assignments that had been written by machine.
I've been playing with the system for the last couple of hours, and as best as I can tell, ChatGPT now does a much better job than it did when first released at only citing papers that actually exist.
They're not perfect—for example, DOIs can be wrong and some are fabricated—but most are not.
If I'm not just imagining things, it raises an interesting question.
While this constitutes an "improvement" in the technology in some manner of speaking, it's unclear whether this is a desirable development. It strikes me as a step that makes detecting more difficult without confering any significant epistemic improvement.
In other words, if the system has really been adjusted to avoid citing fake papers, this constitutes a deliberate choice to create more persuasive bullshit.
@ct_bergstrom The biggest problem currently facing the internet is the rampant spread of bad information. Google, in particular, has faced growing criticism of its core search product because people are creating so much bullshit designed to confound pagerank.
Facing this growing storm of bullshit threatening their core technology, it's incredible that the amazing breakthrough they've come up with is... an automated system for bullshit creation.
Carl T. Bergstrom
Tom Bellin 