Why ChatGPT and other AI chatbots make things up
Why an AI chatbot guesses its answer instead of looking it up
An AI chatbot like ChatGPT has no list of facts to check before it answers. Instead, it plays a word game you have played since you were a child. It plays it very fast, again and again, and the answer is what comes out.
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Finish this sentence: "Once upon a". You thought "time" at once. You looked nothing up. You have heard those words together so many times that the next one comes by itself.
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Behind the chatbot app is a program that plays this game too. The app sends your question to this program, and the program writes the answer. It is called a language model.
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Before it ever met you, the model read a huge amount of text: web pages, books, articles. From all of it, it learned which words tend to come next. This long reading is called training.
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Now it writes its answer to you, one word at a time. After "Rono's Bikes is a", what usually comes next in texts about shops? "Family" is one of the most likely words, and this time the model writes "family".
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Then comes the next word, and the next. "Started by his father in 1998" is just what texts about family shops tend to say. Each word fits the words before it.
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At no point does the model look up Rono's shop. It only adds words that fit, and a sentence that fits is not always a sentence that is true. Yet the same game also gets many answers right, and you are about to see which ones.
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Quick check
A bus time.
Show the answer
No, unless it searched the web first. It wrote a time that fits a sentence like that. It may be right, but it is a guess, so check the real timetable.
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Go further
Two more names.