Found a dumb trick to stop AI chatbots from making up fake sources

I was trying to get an AI to help me cite sources for a blog post last week, and it kept inventing books that didn't exist. Like, it gave me a reference from "Dr. Sarah Jenkins" with a 2022 journal article that I could not find anywhere online. On a hunch, I told the chatbot to only pull from Wikipedia pages that existed before 2020, and bam, it stopped hallucinating citations. Something about the cutoff date keeps it from fabricating plausible-sounding nonsense. It's not perfect, but it cut my fact-checking time from an hour to like 15 minutes. Has anyone else stumbled onto a weird fix like this for AI hallucinations?

2 comments

2 Comments

tarag281mo agoMost Upvoted

Wasted an hour yesterday chasing a fake source about penguins in the Arctic.

abby_black1mo ago

Oh man, @tarag28 that's rough, I started just double checking the first link before diving in now.