ChatGPT can make mistakes, check important information!
That’s the message that you will find on every page of the platform, and you will see a similar disclaimer on most, if not all, Artificial Intelligence websites. And you would do well to heed the message.
When you read a disclaimer like that, it negates questions like “why cant I let AI think for me?” The simple answer is, of course, that companies like ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude depend on information that has been fed to them.
If the information that goes in is wrong, what comes out is wrong as well.
AI companies collect vast quantities of data to train their models through automated web scraping, commercial data licensing, internal user generated interactions, and synthetic data generation. Deepak Gupta
I was on ChatGPT, “talking” to my Robot mate “Rob” about 3D printing, and what could be done with it, and among other things, he said I could make WordPress accessories with a 3D printer. Granted, a few minutes earlier, the topic had been PHP coding and fixing problems, but I caught the slip.
Depending on technology is a fact of life these days, but we really shouldn’t accept everything blindly. Even the old “Google Home” can only go by the information fed to it. If I ask what the weather forecast is, and hear that it is sunny while it’s actually raining, I’m going to believe what I see and hear outside.
I always check sources when I get information from AI.
It pays to check the information provided by AI. I always go to the source and research it, and if I am writing content for publication, I do just that, I write it myself. I wrote here about a student who was caught for plagiarism after copying content and claiming it as their own.
How do I check if AI is correct?
Always look for the following: What is the source? Who is the author? What was the publication date? And what context was it written in?
These are important questions, and I would especially ask them if writing for publication. Even if I wasn’t writing for publication, I’d still find answers to these. I hate sounding like a doofus when talking to others.
I know that when you have a big project happening it’s tempting to take a short cut, but it really doesn’t pay in the long run.