A fun thing to do: Ask ChatGPT a question, and ask for references. Then try to track down the references. I just asked a simple question about the Thirty Years

A fun thing to do: Ask ChatGPT a question, and ask for references. Then try to track down the references. I just asked a simple question about the Thirty Years War, and with the answer it gave me two valid references (including C.V. Wedgewood, yay), and one that was completely made up. As far as I understand, LLMs have no model of reality to base results on; they're just an enormously complex statistical model of "what is the next word in the series".