We all know by now that ChatGPT is full of incorrect data but I trusted it will no go wrong after I asked for a list of sci-fi books recommendations (short stories anthologies in Spanish mostly) including book names, editorial, print year and of course ISBN.
Some of the books do exist but the majority are nowhere to be found. I pick the one that caught my interest the most and contacted the editorial directly after I did not find it in their website or anywhere else.
This is what they replied (Google Translate):
ChatGPT got it wrong.
We don’t have any books with that title.
In the ISBN that has given you the last digit is incorrect. And the correct one (9788477028383) corresponds to “The Holy Fountain” by Henry James.
Nor have we published any science fiction anthologies in the last 25 years.
I quick search in the “old site” shows that others have experienced the same with ChatGPT and ISBN searches… For some reason I thought it will no go wrong in this case, but it did.
Just as a fun example of a really basic language model, here’s my phones predictive model answering your question. I put the starting tokens in brackets for illustration only, everything following is generated by choosing one of the three suggestions it gives me. I mostly chose the first but occasionally the second or third option because it has a tendency to get stuck in loops.
[We know LLMs are not intelligent because] they are not too expensive for them to be able to make it work for you and the other things that are you going to do.
Yeah it’s nonsense, but the main significant difference between this and an LLM is the size of the network and the quantity of data used to train it.