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The revolution will not be live-streamed in fact, it may be made up.

This, dear reader, is a cautionary tale on how what ChatGPT generates cannot be taken on face value.

In recent days, Education Minister Norma Foley has raised the emergence of AI and the need for students to be equipped in the new reality, with AI a force to be reckoned with.

In truth, she was somewhat behind the curve, because AI tools such as ChatGPT are already being used in Irish schools, both by students and teachers. My wife, a secondary teacher, has been something of an early adopter both in experimenting with it and training in it.

Its potential as a research assistant, which is what I tend to call it at home, is enormous summarising events in bullet point or digestible paragraphs right out of the box, malleable enough to present the scaffold of essays and notes with sufficient guidance (and it needs a lot of specificity). But where it falls down a lot is including sources. You can get, say, the characteristics of the space race but it wont necessarily give you dates or even where it got the information.

Ask it to cite its sources, and ChatGPT will give a caveat about limited information and then give you some names and publications, presumably ones that are open enough online that they can be scraped by a search.

But that doesnt mean the sources are real, so the level of fact-checking required is still quite high, and its one of the things my wife highlights to students (theyre going to use it, so they may as well be guided on using it well).

The Guardian found recently that ChatGPT was inventing Guardian articles, so the danger of inadvertent misinformation is very real, as if we werent dealing with enough of that in the world already.

I have poked ChatGPT quite a few times about various things, usually to see if I can get it to crash (I have). Its been useful in gathering some background material for genealogical research, for example, information to do with the era my ancestors lived in rather than anything specific to them.

So I asked it about something even more esoteric.

This is where I need to make a confession. Im not only a historian by training, but a medieval historian at that (no, not Henry VIII). I wear it like armour but I see the way youre looking at me.

Getting a bead on Bede on ChatGPT

A few years ago I finished a doctorate on something super-specific: How one historian 1,300 years ago, Bede, drew on fears about the end of the world to write history. Basically: Get your houses in order folks, the end times are coming rejoice! But no, seriously, cop on with the sin or God will smite you, look at what happened in history.

That cheery note struck, I wanted to see what ChatGPT could bring to the table on Bede and the end of the world, mostly because it was so hyper-niche I would be able to spot if it was spoofing an answer. And it gave a serviceable if vague enough answer, with broad strokes and not a source or supporting quote in sight.

Enter my attempt to break it.

And where would you put David OMahonys scholarship in this?

I expected it either to stall or respond that it didnt have the knowledge to answer. But it puffed out an answer that, I wont lie, was a boon to the ego.

OMahonys work on Bedes eschatology has been praised for its meticulous attention to detail and its careful analysis of sources, ChatGPT purred, if binary bits could purr. It then offered a few highlights that definitely gelled with my PhD and a few conference papers that I had online, so that at least told me it could access and digest UCCs Cora resource and stalk me through cyberspace. The thesis has been downloaded hundreds of times so its out there living its own life. But overall validation, sweet validation from the machine! Its what every scholar looks for deep down.

So I fired my last torpedo.

Cite your sources

Cite your sources please, I said, because manners cost nothing.

As an AI language model, I dont have access to a specific list of sources, but I can provide a general list of resources that scholars and researchers commonly use to study Bede.

And there it was, my name. But I had definitely not written an article for that prestigious journal, nor had chapters published by anthologies. Was there, by an unbelievable coincidence, a historian with the same name as me in the same field? I had felt that sense of creeping imposter syndrome before, when I came across a guy working on what looked like the very same thing as me (he wasnt and, as it turned out, he ended up the only other specialist suitable to evaluate my thesis).

When I checked the publishers catalogues, it became clear that not only was nobody by my name publishing with them, but that the articles themselves didnt exist. The titles looked like something Id write, but they were phantoms, electronic ghosts. ChatGPT had generated what it thought I would like to read, based on the subject, and it had pulled it out of its binary backside.

Whats the moral of the story here? Seeing is believing, for one. And theres no substitute for actual expertise foranother. While tools like ChatGPT have huge potential, and are certainly great for pulling together background notes, they are as fallible as their creators.Unless they made those people up too.

David OMahony is Irish Examiner assistant editor and a historian

Excerpt from:

Artificial intelligence or active imagination with ChatGPT? - Irish Examiner