ChatGPT Provided Non-Existent Citations and Links when Prompted by Users

November 30, 2022

ChatGPT mistakenly generated non-existent but convincing citations and links, a phenomenon known as 'hallucination'. This incident underscores the importance of safe and secure AI practices. For those interested in shaping responsible AI governance and contributing to harm prevention efforts, JOIN US.

This incident highlights the need for Project Cerebellum's Map function as we work towards establishing guardrails for AI and ensuring the HISPI Project Cerebellum TAIM measures up to our expectations of trustworthy AI.

Matched TAIM controls

Suggested mapping from embedding similarity (not a formal assessment). Browse all TAIM controls

MEASURE 2.6 — similarity 0.654, rank 1. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MAP 1.6 — similarity 0.650, rank 2. TAIM detail and related incidents →
MEASURE 2.10 — similarity 0.649, rank 3. TAIM detail and related incidents →

Alleged deployer: openai
Alleged developer: openai
Alleged harmed parties: chatgpt-users

Source

Data from the AI Incident Database (AIID). Cite this incident: https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/464

Data source

Incident data is from the AI Incident Database (AIID).

When citing the database as a whole, please use:

McGregor, S. (2021) Preventing Repeated Real World AI Failures by Cataloging Incidents: The AI Incident Database. In Proceedings of the Thirty-Third Annual Conference on Innovative Applications of Artificial Intelligence (IAAI-21). Virtual Conference.

Pre-print on arXiv · Database snapshots & citation guide

We use weekly snapshots of the AIID for stable reference. For the official suggested citation of a specific incident, use the “Cite this incident” link on each incident page.