Just asking it anything non-trivial from a field you're already knowledgeable in is enough, really. Sometimes it corrects itself after asking it to search the W

Just asking it anything non-trivial from a field you're already knowledgeable in is enough, really. Sometimes it corrects itself after asking it to search the Web to confirm, but usually it's not enough. Even simple queries like "Assuming no other devices are connected on the bus, does having USB hubs in between host and USB 2.0 device influence available data bandwidth?" can make it spew answers that would easily pass as correct in eyes of someone who genuinely asks to get an answer, but are nowhere near helpful, especially when you start looking closer at used argumentation. It's like a poorly prepared student making informed guesses on an exam in hopes to get at least some things right (which, btw, is a much better metaphor for what's actually happening there than "hallucination"). Sometimes it even guesses right, but then slightly changing the grammar used in your prompt can make it go off-track again as it makes it guess differently. If you ask such student something in hopes to actually learn something from them, how are you going to tell whether they made it all up or not? It's a tool for language processing, which some limited and heavily lossily compressed knowledge base that's helping it with such processing. It works well for that. For knowledge retrieval beyond "fetch some search results and abridge them for me", it's absolutely useless.