I recently read a good article on the different kinds of truth a language model operates with by Luke Mann, Liam Magee and Vanicka Arora, Truth Machines: Synthesizing Veracity in AI Language Models, but despite its lovely typology of truths (consensus, correspondence, coherence and pragmatic) it doesn’t help me with this example of a ChatGPT untruth from last May.

So someone wrote an op-ed for a Norwegian newspaper and quoted a much loved former prime minister, Kåre Willoch, as having said “Russia annexed Crimea because they were afraid that Ukraine might become part of Russia.” Today another op-ed was published by Eirik Sakariassen who said he had been surprised by the quote so had looked for it but couldn’t find it anywhere. When he asked the author of the original op-ed he said he had got the quote from ChatGPT.

OK, so far this is a typical when-will-people-stop-thinking-everything-they-generate-with-ChatGPT is true thing. Stuff like this happens every day. I mean the same day we also heard that RFK published a report where several of the sources were made up. A few days earlier several big newspapers had published that summer reading list of non-existent books. The month before Tromsø politicians voted to permanently shut down seven schools based on a report that turned out to be AI-generated and cite made-up sources. Etc.

But the next thing that happened was different. People started posting that Kåre Willoch could have said that.

And sure, Willoch sort of discusses the general topic but he certainly doesn’t say exactly what the first op-ed quoted him as saying.

But does it matter? I think it does. Yes, humans also make stuff up and misremember things. But LLMs do this systematically. That’s a major difference, and it means we need to systematically distrust LLM-generated claims.