I've seen exactly the same phenomenon over on /r/whatsthatbook, where users try to identify half-remembered books based on their plots. Whenever a post gets po

I've seen exactly the same phenomenon over on /r/whatsthatbook, where users try to identify half-remembered books based on their plots. Whenever a post gets popular enough, odds are good that somebody will ask ChatGPT and post its answer as their own. Usually, it will either choose a popular but wrong book in approximately the correct genre, or just flat-out invent a book by a real author. And then it will spit out a mixture of real plot details, distortions, and falsehoods in order to try to be as convincing as possible. These answers are very obviously AI-generated (if you're familiar with the book or author in question) and stand in stark contrast to the human-generated answers. It's not uncommon that real people will make guesses that turn out not to be correct, but they almost never drastically misremember books they've read. I find it incredibly frustrating, because even though ChatGPT could in theory be useful for this kind of thing, it only works if you know to apply the appropriate level of skepticism. When people start posting AI garbage without distinguishing it, they're drastically lowering the signal-to-noise ratio of what is otherwise a very useful resource, all in the name of gaining a few meaningless karma points. And to forestall the inevitable objection: yes, I know it's possible that there are also lots of correct ChatGPT-generated answers, and I'm just not counting them because they don't draw attention to themselves. But I doubt that's the case, because I've experimented with it myself, and its success rate on all but the easiest questions is extremely low.