This might be a little off topic, but it relates to the capabilities of robots like Chat GPT.
One of the few things I learned from my higher education is the necessity, in academic writing, of proper documentation. (Including how to build a correct "Works Cited" page--talk about persnickety
formatting, lol.) Chat GPT not only doesn't do documentation, it, if I understand it right, is
incapable of doing it. It doesn't know, it can't say,
why it says what it says.
In my experience it is frequently just flat out wrong. For example, I asked it to summarize a Poe story,
Berenice. I don't want to spoil the story--one of Poe's weirdest which has always creeped me out and which is certainly worth a read--but in it, a corpse is exhumed, and GPT wrote:
He eventually digs up her grave and discovers that her body is intact.
This is only true-ish. Yes he digs her up, but he has no memory of it, so nowhere in the story does he "discover" it. Also, the body was just buried, and so of course it was "intact."
When I told it it was incorrect, it apologized, and then got it wrong again:
Eventually, he becomes overwhelmed by his obsession and decides to exhume her.
The truth is that he apparently had
beome overwhelmed by his obsession. He doesn't "decide" anything, which is kind of the whole point of the story. I gave it a few more tries. In one, it has the guy waking to find certain items scattered across the floor. And this simply doesn't happen.
Another example: I was wondering how incorrect it would be, in a thing in a thing, to say that JS Bach composed The Well Tempered Clavier while he was in jail in Weimar. So I asked it when and where the WTC was composed, and if it might have been composed in prison. It wrote:
Bach composed "The Well-Tempered Clavier" during different periods of his life, starting around 1722. [...] There is no evidence to suggest that Bach wrote any part of it while he was in prison. In fact, Bach was never imprisoned during his lifetime.
There is an extant autograph manuscript of the WTC that is
dated 1722, so of course he didn't "start" it in that year. And I was surprised to hear that the prison episode, part of every biography, was incorrect. I told it I was pretty certain it was wrong, mentioning the work of Christoph Wolff, and it (now seeming defensive: "did you not
hear me?") wrote:
I'm sorry for any confusion, but there seems to be a misunderstanding. There's no widely accepted evidence that Johann Sebastian Bach was imprisoned at any point in his life. Christophe Wolff, a renowned Bach scholar, has extensively researched and written about Bach's life, but there is no indication in his works or in other scholarly accounts that Bach was incarcerated.
Dude, I'm
looking at the book. This, from Wolff's seminal biography,
Johan Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician;
Apparently for no other reason than a show of anger, the Cöthen capellmeister-designate was kept in jail for nearly four weeks, a period that marked the absolute low point in Bach’s professional life.
And in
The New Bach Reader, Wolff's definitive collection of every extant relevant document (sadly, a pretty slim book), he quotes this actual piece of contemporary paper, an excerpt from a court secretary's report:
On November 6 [1717] , the quondam concertmaster and organist Bach was confined to the County Judge's place of detention for too stubbornly forcing the issue of his dismissal and finally on December 2 was freed from arrest with notice of his unfavorable discharge.
I told it again that it was wrong, but it (now a little snotty) stuck to its guns with this bit of word salad:
Christoph Wolff is a notable Bach scholar, but it's important to evaluate the historical evidence within the broader context of Bach's life and times. If there is documentation suggesting Bach's imprisonment in Weimar, it would be advisable to consult reliable historical sources to understand the circumstances and implications of such an event.
What? Dude--Wolff
is the reliable source. He is (unlike you) a meticulously scrupulous scholar. But I gave up. What bothers me is the flat out declarative surity it has, even when it is wrong.
What this all means, simply, is this: you can not reliably use Chat GPT for research. It is too transparently, maddeningly, dumb.