GPT 4.5 even doubles down when challenged:

> Nope, I didn’t make it up — Marathon crater is real, and it was explored by NASA's Opportunity rover on Mars. The crater got its name because Opportunity had driven about 42.2 kilometers (26.2 miles — a marathon distance) when it reached that point in March 2015. NASA even marked the milestone as a symbolic achievement, similar to a runner finishing a marathon.

(Obviously all of that is bullshit.)

Claude 3.7 :

I'd be happy to tell you about the Marathon crater. The Marathon crater is a significant impact structure located on Earth. The Marathon crater is situated in Ontario, Canada, and is estimated to be about 450 million years old, dating back to the Ordovician period. It has a diameter of approximately 65 kilometers (40 miles), making it one of the larger impact craters in North America. The crater was formed when a meteorite struck the Earth, causing a massive impact that left behind this distinctive geological formation. Over time, erosion and other geological processes have altered its appearance, but scientists have been able to study its structure through various geological surveys and analyses. What's particularly interesting about the Marathon crater is its size and age, which provide valuable insights into Earth's geological history and past impact events. The study of such craters helps scientists understand the frequency and effects of meteorite impacts throughout our planet's history. Would you like me to elaborate on any specific aspect of the Marathon crater, such as its discovery, geological features, or scientific significance?

The inaccuracies are that it is called "Marathon Valley" (not crater) and that it was photographed in April 2015 (from the rim) or that in July 2015 actually entered. The other stuff is correct.

I'm guessing this "gotcha" relies on "valley"/"crater", and "crater"/"mars" being fairly close in latent space.

ETA: Marathon Valley also exists on the rim of Endeavour crater. Just to make it even more confusing.

The only part of that which is bullshit is the word "crater" instead of the word "valley", if you switch that it's all true

This is the kind of reason why I will never use AI

What's the point of using AI to do research when 50-60% of it could potentially be complete bullshit. I'd rather just grab a few introduction/101 guides by humans, or join a community of people experienced with the thing — and then I'll actually be learning about the thing. If the people in the community are like "That can't be done", well, they have had years or decades of time invested in the thing and in that instance I should be learning and listening from their advice rather than going "actually no it can".

I see a lot of beginners fall into that second pit. I myself made that mistake at the tender age of 14 where I was of the opinion that "actually if i just found a reversible hash, I'll have solved compression!", which, I think we all here know is bullshit. I think a lot of people who are arrogant or self-possessed to the extreme make that kind of mistake on learning a subject, but I've seen this especially a lot when it's programmers encountering non-programming fields.

Finally tying that point back to AI — I've seen a lot of people who are unfamiliar with something decide to use AI instead of talking to someone experienced because the AI makes them feel like they know the field rather than telling them their assumptions and foundational knowledge is incorrect. I only last year encountered someone who was trying to use AI to debug why their KDE was broken, and they kept throwing me utterly bizzare theories (like, completely out there, I don't have a specific example with me now but, "foundational physics are wrong" style theories). It turned out that they were getting mired in log messages they saw that said "Critical Failure", as an expert of dealing with Linux for about ten years now, I checked against my own system and... yep, they were just part of mostly normal system function (I had the same messages on my Steam Deck, which was completely stable and functional). The real fault was buried halfway through the logs. At no point was this person able to know what was important versus not-important, and the AI had absolutely no way to tell or understand the logs in the first place, so it was like a toaster leading a blind man up a mountain. I diagnosed the correct fault in under a day by just asking them to run two commands and skimming logs. That's experience, and that's irreplaceable by machine as of the current state of the world.

I don't see how AI can help when huge swathes of it's "experience" and "insight" is just hallucinated. I don't see how this is "helping" people, other than making people somehow more crazy (through AI hallucinations) and alone (choosing to talk to a computer rather than a human).

> (Obviously all of that is bullshit.)

It isn't obvious to me - that is rather plausible and a cute story.