I'm quite puzzled as to whether #ChatGPT has gotten better with citations or not.

On one hand, it wrote a paper for me about bullshit that contained only references to actual papers. I don't think it used to be able to do that.

After an evening of playing around, I'm wondering if the change is not any kind of patch to the code itself that I drifted to giving it easier prompts for which it has a fuller training set and less need to fabricate references.

The more offbeat the topic, the more fabricated references I get. Some not completely crazy topics (the physics of asparagus) feature only fabricated references.

That said, I'm heartbroken that this is not a real paper.

Salinas-Melgoza, A., Taylor, A. H., and Seed, A. (2020). Wild crows discriminate objects based on their physical properties and cause a small fire to obtain food. Scientific Reports, 10(1), 1-7.