Study: ChatGPT cited nonexistent Washington Post, Miami Herald, and Los Angeles Times articles and fabricated a sexual harassment story about a law professor
The AI chatbot can misrepresent key facts with great flourish, even citing a fake Washington Post article as evidence
Washington Post
Context & Ripple Effects
Earlier research had already found that ChatGPT could produce polished prose that carried misleading narratives, even when it could sometimes debunk them; this report makes the failure more concrete by showing how authoritative-looking sourcing can be invented in convincing but misleading chatbot output.
The issue matters beyond a wrong answer: fabricated reporting and an invented allegation can implicate both the news organizations named as sources and the person described in the false account. Later coverage of bogus legal citations in a lawyer’s ChatGPT-written brief underscores how false citations can move from chat into consequential use.
First-order effects
Users relying on ChatGPT’s citations have a direct reason to verify linked reporting and factual claims rather than treat confident prose as evidence.
Professional users in law, research, and publishing face stronger incentives to add source-checking before reusing chatbot output, especially when citations or allegations are involved.
Chatbot providers are pressured to make unsupported claims and unverifiable citations easier to detect, since an apparently sourced answer can fail more dangerously than an uncited one.
Third-order effects
If citation fabrication persists, trust in AI-assisted research will depend less on fluent answers and more on verifiable provenance, with retrieval and auditing becoming key product differentiators.
The pattern also shows how generative systems can amplify misinformation through invented authority, a risk later seen when leading chatbots repeated claims from a pro-Kremlin disinformation network.
The trend: This is an early instance of the shift from concerns about AI text quality to scrutiny of whether AI-generated claims can be traced to real, accountable sources.
AI chatbots don't lie on purpose. They're programmed to respond to any query, drawing on patterns of word association in their data (and search results, for Bing) to generate plausible answers. …
Asked for examples of sexual harassment at law schools, ChatGPT named a GW prof accused of touching a student on a class trip to Alaska, citing a WashPost story. The prof is real. The rest was made up. We wrote about what happens when AIs lie about you: https://www.washingtonpost…
new: ChatGPT said a law prof. sexually touched a student on a class Alaska trip, citing a 2018 WaPo article as proof. There was no WaPo article. No trip. He said he'd never been accused of sexual assault. What happens when chatbots lie. w/@WillOremus https://www.washingtonpost.co…
This particular problem is not just an AI problem. As an idea or interpretation gets reproduced, it tends to get treated as more certain. The only way to combat that is expertise and a willingness to go back to the sources. https://twitter.com/...
Terrifying & frustrating. ChatGPT is clearly still in the developing stage so why is it already publicly available? It should be tested and developed privately. And why is no one legally responsible for it? With any other product this would be the case. https://www.washingtonpost…
Thread. Reminder that these programs are not “intelligent,” but rather pattern-recognition tools that can look very quickly through insane amounts of data and replicate the tendencies and combinations they see most frequently. “AI” is a misnomer. https://twitter.com/...
this whole thread is worth reading. and it's chilling. the complete pollution of the information of the ecosphere that I have been warning about has begun. https://twitter.com/...
ChatGPT has taken our culture by storm, and for many, the information it spouts out is taken as truth. But what happens when it's wrong? Welcome to the dangers of garbage in, garbage out https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... @pranshuverma_ @WillOremus #chatgpt #artificialintelligen…
“[A USC prof] was contacted by a journalist who had used ChatGPT to research sources for a story. The bot offered examples of [the prof's] work, including an article title, publication date, and quotes. All of it sounded plausible, and all of it was fake.” https://www.washingtonp…
Sounds like ChatGPT was trained off reddit comments. “...this creativity can also be an engine for erroneous claims; the models can misrepresent key facts with great flourish, even fabricating primary sources to back up their claims.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
So far made-up primary sources have made ChatGPT-4 useless for any research I've tried to do using it. Takes longer to figure out the source is fake than to find a real one myself. (Though I did love the time ChatGPT said a recipe was “one I have used myself in the past.") https:…
In the Good Fight Season 7 in our mind, this is episode 2. ChatGPT not only invented a sexual harassment scandal and named a real law prof, but also created an article to support it. Terrifying. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Can ChatGPT publish something with “actual malice” or a “reckless disregard for the truth”? Maybe we'll find out soon. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
For quite some time Silicon Valley has lived by the motto “move fast and break things” and it has generally served them well given the anemic state of our regulatory and liability frameworks. But that can change quickly and these companies are wholly unprepared for it. https://tw…
Well, this is pretty horrifying, especially with all the politically-motivated false abuse allegations floating around on the internet. #ChatGPT #AI 1/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
In the near future, most content on social media will be AI generated. And this content will be full of plausible-sounding false information. We are not ready for this. https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
Yeah, a pause is needed! #ChatGPT “ChatGPT sometimes makes up facts. For one law prof, it went too far.” Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ... https://twitter.com/...
Citing a Washington Post article that doesn't exist seems to be a minor problem compared to what will happen when it simply creates the Washington Post article it's citing https://twitter.com/...
Automated defamation by chatbots is, obviously, bad. What's worse is when search engine chatbots do it — when they summarize real articles and still get it wrong, users are much less likely to suspect that the answer is made up. Well, Bing does exactly that 😬. See thread. https:/…
Stop using chatbots for RESEARCH! They are not there yet. ChatGPT invented a sexual harassment scandal and named a real law prof as the accused https://www.washingtonpost.com/ ...
@JonathanTurley ... Turley is not the only one who's found AI chatbots making things up about him. An Australian mayor is threatening to sue after ChatGPT claimed he'd been imprisoned for bribery. USC prof @katecrawford dubs these falsely sourced stories “hallucitations.” https:/…
USA Today ran my column on how ChatGPT falsely stated that I was accused of assaulting students on a trip I never took while working at a school I never taught at. It is only the latest cautionary tale on how artificial “artificial intelligence” can be. https://www.usatoday.com/.…
I also haven't seen any good argument for why Section 230 would apply to ChatGPT. I just saw a story yesterday that made me think “well the defamation lawsuits are definitely coming” and guess what popped up this morning: https://www.reuters.com/...