Japan Top 10

ChatGPT (and other similar large language models) have become famous as tools for writing anything from academic papers to wedding speeches. But they have also become famous for hallucinating, inventing facts to fit the story (sometimes, you might think Donald Trump uses Chat GPT to write his speeches). And even though the large language models are populated by ingesting facts from the Internet (perhaps I should say ”facts”), they often make embarrasing mistakes.

For instance, I asked ChatGPT to write a text about Koga in Ibaraki, a fairly unremarkable little town but with documented history since about 800 AD, and once the location of a large castle and an important center of commerce, as it was the confluence if three large rivers and shipping passed through here on the way to Edo. It was also the first stopover on the route from Tokyo to Nikko, the World Heritage site where Tokugawa Ieyasu is venerated.

The results were strangely misleading. The city has a famous lantern festival where the different city subdivisions ”fight” against each other by crashing lanterns on long poles into each other, the one whose lantern still stays up the winner.

This festival takes place the first weekend in December, and has for the past several hundred years. But ChatGPT claims it takes place in summer. At least it got the peach blossom festival right in March.

This is just one isolated example, but the point is that you can not trust these AI systems to come up with the correct answers. After all, they are built to answer something which they think the user wants to hear, and make up the answer when they do. Not how you want to plan your vacation.