ChatGPT produces made-up nonexistent references

236 points

4 years ago

I was trying to find references to mathematical treatment of lists, and queried ChatGPT the following:

Please provide references that deal with the mathematical properties of lists

To which ChatGPT responded as follows:

    "Introduction to the Mathematics of Lists" by Peter J. Cameron (https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/introduction-to-the-mathematics-of-lists/3F0C6D0E69E49BF6D5CD6CA5D6A761B2)

    "List Processing and Programming" by John F. Sowa (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~fp/courses/lp/lectures.html)

    "List Processing in Prolog" by David H. D. Warren (https://www.cs.purdue.edu/homes/hosking/726/html/prolog_lists.html)

    "Introduction to the Mathematics of Lists and Trees" by Meinard Müller (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007%2F978-3-319-05147-1)

    "Mathematics of Lists and Trees" by Markus N. Rabe (https://www.researchgate.net/publication/296955213_Mathematics_of_Lists_and_Trees)

I was pretty surprised and happy, because I hadn't had much success with Google. But it turns out that every single one of those references and links are made up. The references don't exist and the links themselves appear to be cobbled together. The last link for example, takes you to a paper on "Grain mixes for subgrade layers" - the title in the url is irrelevant and only the number matters.

Googling for some of those authors throws up author pages with their publications, and it turns out they've never published papers with those titles! See for example, http://www-groups.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/~pjc/publ/

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