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Jonathan May, Research Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Southern California

ChatGPT is great – you're just using it wrong

ChatGPT United States Abraham Lincoln WILLIAM HENRY HARRISON
ChatGPT is better used for playacting than playing at finding facts. EvgeniyShkolenko/iStock via Getty Images

It doesn’t take much to get ChatGPT to make a factual mistake. My son is doing a report on U.S. presidents, so I figured I’d help him out by looking up a few biographies. I tried asking for a list of books about Abraham Lincoln and it did a pretty good job:

screen capture of text
A reasonable list of books about Lincoln. Screen capture by Jonathan May., CC BY-ND
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