ChatGPT Cannot Read Content from URLs

I see people being deceived by this again and again: ChatGPT can NOT read content from URLs that you give it, but will convincingly pretend that it can

Crucial to spread this message any time you see anyone falling into this traphttps://t.co/VXRcp0s47D

— Simon Willison (@simonw) March 19, 2023

This @openai bug is really catastrophic (I think we should categorize instances where a language model blatantly deceives people as bugs, since I'm confident they're not desired behavior by the system maintainers)

I see well informed people justifiably fall for this every day

— Simon Willison (@simonw) March 19, 2023

I'd like to see ChatGPT add a feature where it occasionally annotates responses with a little bit of extra context text warning against common prompting mistakes like this

— Simon Willison (@simonw) March 19, 2023

Any time you find yourself doubting this, run your own experiment like this one: try changing the URL it just pretended to summarize to a new (but realistic) one that you made up https://t.co/ZbS17UTHSp

— Simon Willison (@simonw) March 19, 2023

Here's the big challenge: It's easy to perform a (flawed) experiment yourself which will make you believe that it CAN read URLs

You need to take the next, harder step and design and run a follow-up experiment to help prove to yourself that it can't

— Simon Willison (@simonw) March 19, 2023

This is a case where your underlying mental model affects your understanding a lot

If you think of ChatGPT as a next-word-predicting language model it's not surprising that it can synthesize an entire story from some URL keywords

Not so much you think of it as some kind of AGI!

— Simon Willison (@simonw) March 19, 2023

Here's some good news: the new GPT-4 model (only available to paying preview users at the moment) is better behaved in this regard - it appears not to pretend it can access URLs any more pic.twitter.com/8gFWMvpjOo

— Simon Willison (@simonw) March 19, 2023

... actually no, it still hallucinates articles in some cases. Here's one of my earlier experiments - this URL is a 404 that I invented but it still produces a realistic summary pic.twitter.com/NUuHyjQ8wV

— Simon Willison (@simonw) March 19, 2023

Added two more sections to my article - one entitled "I still don't believe it" and a section about GPT-4 https://t.co/Kvqp1dMZVA pic.twitter.com/VndVPleRsT

— Simon Willison (@simonw) March 19, 2023