We all know by now that ChatGPT is full of incorrect data but I trusted it will no go wrong after I asked for a list of sci-fi books recommendations (short stories anthologies in Spanish mostly) including book names, editorial, print year and of course ISBN.
Some of the books do exist but the majority are nowhere to be found. I pick the one that caught my interest the most and contacted the editorial directly after I did not find it in their website or anywhere else.
This is what they replied (Google Translate):
ChatGPT got it wrong.
We don’t have any books with that title.
In the ISBN that has given you the last digit is incorrect. And the correct one (9788477028383) corresponds to “The Holy Fountain” by Henry James.
Nor have we published any science fiction anthologies in the last 25 years.
I quick search in the “old site” shows that others have experienced the same with ChatGPT and ISBN searches… For some reason I thought it will no go wrong in this case, but it did.
“I used a hammer to screw screws and it didn’t work.”
ChatGPT is a generative language model. It was not built for this kind of use case, it was not ever intended for this kind of use case, and the fact that it doesn’t succeed at this is like saying that it can’t make you a pizza. The only logical response is “well yeah, what did you expect it to do?”
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I use it for D&D. NPCs, full dungeons, menus, taverns… shops … It’s great for that kind of thing.
I find it very useful as a “secretary” and to help me structure my thoughts. When I work on a document (usually technical) I first ask him to propose a document structure, explaining him what kind of document and on which subject. I then tell him how to improve his proposition.
Then I take each chapter and tell him to ask me questions to help me structure my reasoning. Then, I answer his questions and he writes the paragraph from my answers.
I find that it helps greatly, it allows me to write documents much faster and I also have the feeling it improves the quality. It allows me to sometimes think about things that I wouldn’t have on my own.
Modify language.
Eh, yes. But also not really.
This is just an anecdotal post, not a complain. No need to take it as seriously as you seem to take it… :)
For our entertainment, you should ask Chat GPT what stories are in those anthologies and give you short summaries of each story.