“why does chatgpt just confidently make stuff up?? i asked it something yesterday and it gave me a totally wrong answer š”
This comes up a lot, and it’s worth understanding because it’ll keep happening even as these tools get better.
When you ask ChatGPT something, it will often search the web and find relevant information. But then it has to write you an answer using what it found, and it does this by building the answer one word at a time, predicting what word is most likely to come next based on what it just found, plus patterns from everything else it’s ever read.
That’s where things go wrong. It isn’t checking whether what it’s writing actually matches the sources it found. So it can pull in the wrong detail, mix two things up, or fill a gap with something that simply sounds plausible. A wrong answer and a right answer look exactly the same to it while it’s writing them.
The things it’s most likely to get wrong are specific names, dates, numbers, and anything recent or niche. If the answer matters, check it yourself before you rely on it.