alt Hacker NewsNot a bad actor spreading misinformation, but I encountered a similarish weird, dystopian experience with ChatGPT.
Utilized ChatGPT on my PC to search local plant nursery inventories for a specific tree. Output showed several local nurseries with rough probability descriptions regarding whether they have the tree in inventory, except for one nursery. For that nursery, ChatGPT provided a direct link to the specified tree, which was directly on the nursery's domain, showed a picture and description of the tree, and even showed the item in-stock with 6 in inventory at the 5-gallon size.
Excited, I plan my trip and am about to pick up my tree, I then double-check the nursery site on my phone to verify location and stock. As I attempted to navigate the website inventory to find the tree, I noticed that the tree no longer existed. There is no page for that varietal or species of tree on the entire website's domain.
I head back inside and look at the ChatGPT provided link on the PC and there it is, showing the inventory that doesn't show up when you use the nursery's website to directly find it without the provided link. A call to the nursery, further verified that the tree is not in stock, nor have they ever carried it.
ChatGPT made it all up. Did ChatGPT decide to do this, or did the nursery pay for this type of "advertising" to generate in-person customers? Nevertheless, still an incredibly weird and dystopian experience.
Replies
Did you consider that the website made it up and fed it to ChatGPT?
It sounds like a bundle of very common SEO tricks combined with the differential between your human user agent’s visit.
Perhaps ChatGPT only showed you what the nursery told it about.
This phenomenon is not unique to LLM. If you telephone a store, chances are that the salesman who answers the phone will tell you only what you want to hear. They don’t even strictly need to lie. The store only wins if you drive there and walk in the door. Why should they discourage you from doing that very thing?
This concept was driven home to me at the dry cleaners. Why should a dry cleaner stop work and answer the phone, only to tell a customer that their batch isn’t ready? They just got taken off-task for a non-revenue interaction. It doesn’t matter, because even if the customer’s batch is ready, they aren’t there to pay and pick it up!
Not being able to trust your tools is certainly dystopian...
It seems that it generated a page with a plausible answer for a very long tail subject for which the random part of the generation could become prominent. We used to say that it hallucinated the answer. Another term is confabulation.
If only the nursery had a MCP server /s
It didn’t generate a link (sources) when it claimed it was in stock