The writer is the Andrew M. Heller Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton SchoolWhether for writing essays, passing academic examinations, or creating software code, ChatGPT has been making headlines since its launch in November.
It is well documented that the artificial intelligence chatbot is knowledgeable — enough, for example, to be worth a solid pass in my MBA class at the Wharton School. It is also friendly and smart. But the quality of its answers is proving highly erratic.
Social media is flooded with examples of questions that ChatGPT fails to answer correctly. Its mistakes are now often referred to as hallucinations. These include its confident explanation of why adding broken porcelain to breast milk can help with an infant’s digestion, and its inference that, if two cars take two hours to drive from A to B, it must take four hours for four cars to complete the same journey.