A study from Profound of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity shows that while ChatGPT mostly sources its information from Wikipedia, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity mostly source their information from Reddit.
A study from Profound of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity shows that while ChatGPT mostly sources its information from Wikipedia, Google AI Overviews and Perplexity mostly source their information from Reddit.
In 2005 the article on William Shakespeare contained references to a total of 7 different sources, including a page describing how his name is pronounced, Plutarch, and “Catholic Encyclopedia on CD-ROM”. It contained more text discussing Shakespeare’s supposed Catholicism than his actual plays, which were described only in the most generic terms possible. I’m not noticing any grave mistakes while skimming the text, but it really couldn’t pass for a reliable source or a traditionally solid encyclopedia. And that’s the page on the best known English writer, slightly less popular topics were obviously much shoddier.
It had its significant upsides already back then, sure, no doubt about that. But the teachers’ skepticism wasn’t all that unwarranted.