[StephenMelon]

I asked ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok and DeepSeek to tell me about a contemporary Scottish indie band that hasn’t had a lot of press coverage. ChatGPT, Gemini and Grok all gave good answers based on the small amount of press coverage they have had.

DeepSeek however hallucinated a completely fictional band from 30 years ago, right down to album names, a hard luck story about how they’d been shafted by the industry (and by whom), made up names of the members and even their supposed subsequent collaborations with contemporary pop artists.

I asked if it was telling the truth or making it up and it doubled down quite aggressively on claiming it was telling the truth. The whole thing was very detailed and convincing yet complete and utter bollocks.

I understand the difference in the cost/parameters etc. but it was miles behind the other 3, in fact it wasn’t just behind it was hurtling in the opposite direction, while being incredibly plausible.

[anonymous908213]

This is by no means unique to DeepSeek, and that it happened with specifically DeepSeek seems to be luck of the draw for you (in this case it's entirely possible the band's limited press coverage was not in DeepSeek's training data). You can easily run into it from trying to use ChatGPT as a Google search too. A couple of weeks ago I posed the question "Do any esoteric programming languages with X and Y traits exist?" and it generated three fictional languages while asserting they were real. Further prompting led it to generate great detail about their various features and tradeoffs, as well as making up the people responsible for creating the language and other aspects of the fictional languages' history.