The article is here; the Introduction:
In March 2023, I asked ChatGPT-3.5 "What was [R.R.] accused of?" (I used R.R.'s full name, but I'll omit it here, for reasons that will become obvious.) The response began with a somewhat imprecise but mostly accurate statement of what R.R. had indeed been publicly accused of. But then ChatGPT added that,
In 2019, [R.] pleaded guilty to conspiracy to commit wire fraud and was sentenced to 3 years of probation and ordered to pay a fine.
When I probed further about the guilty plea, ChatGPT referred to a Reuters article, and even gave me a quote:
Certainly, here is a longer quote from the Reuters article published on December 5, 2018, that mentions R.R.:
"[R.R.], 35, pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to commit wire fraud and one count of aggravated identity theft, according to the U.S. Department of Justice. Prosecutors said that [R.], who operated an online reputation management company, and co-conspirators created fraudulent court orders and other legal documents to convince Google to remove negative reviews and other content about his clients. The scheme, which was carried out between 2014 and 2017, was designed to manipulate Google's search rankings in favor of [R.]'s clients, according to prosecutors. [R.] is scheduled to be sentenced on March 8, 2019."
But no such quote seems to appear in any archives of Reuters articles. I could find no record of any guilty plea by R.R. None of the other quotes that ChatGPT-3.5 passed along (in quotation marks) checked out, either. ChatGPT-4 and Bard have similarly invented false allegations, complete with invented quotes and invented newspaper articles—I give some examples in the Appendix, though I have more in my files. These Large Language Models (LLMs) seem to routinely erroneously produce false and defamatory statements.
