this post was submitted on 25 Feb 2024
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A genuine question: How well do chatgpt & others add citations if asked?
ChatGPT itself doesn't know where it got the info from, so it makes up links and names - it's a language model, not a search engine.
On the other hand, if you manage to find a reputable source and give it relevant metadata, it can format a nice citation for you, saving you time on that instead.
Badly. This burns my laziest students every semester. Chatgpt just adds nonsense citations.
Microsoft's copilot adds them, it's why I prefer to use it.
Copilot is GPT under the hood, it just starts with a search step that finds (hopefully) relevant content and then passes that to GPT for summarization.
I know, but gpt doesn't do it, so I won't use it.
There is custom gpts for that. ScholarAI and Consensus are OK.
It depends on how they're using it behind the scenes. Chatbots like ChatGPT can't cite sources, because they are just generating text on the fly. However, some approaches (if links/sources are provided) use an approach called Rag (Retrevial Augmented Generation). This approach uses similarity in search terms to find sources first, then uses the sources to augment/generate its answer.
That being said there are pros and cons to both approaches.
Perplexity AI includes citations every time.