The strangest thing a chatbot has told you with complete confidence

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Chatbots have improved enormously, but they still have a talent for saying completely wrong things with total confidence. They are called hallucinations, though that word makes it sound more mysterious than it is. The model is simply producing something that sounds plausible. Sometimes the results are harmless, sometimes they are hilarious and occasionally they could be dangerous

I once asked a chatbot for the history of my small home town and got a beautifully written account of a castle that has never existed. It even named the lord who supposedly built it and the year it was destroyed. Not a single word of it was true. It was so convincing that I almost started searching for the ruins

I am sure many of you have similar stories. Made up book titles, invented quotes, fictional historical events or confident maths that turns out to be wrong. Some people have found chatbots inventing court cases or scientific papers, which is how a few lawyers have ended up in trouble. A few of those cases made national news

Let's keep this fun, but also useful. Sharing these stories is a good reminder to double check anything important, especially facts, figures and quotes. The more fluent these tools become, the easier it is to forget they can be wrong

What is the strangest or funniest confident nonsense a chatbot has told you? Bonus points if you believed it at first