https://blog.opencagedata.com/post/dont-believe-chatgpt

 

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Updates and musings from the OpenCage team - since 2013.
Makers of the OpenCage Geocoding API.

Don't believe ChatGPT - we do NOT offer a "phone lookup" service

23 Feb 2023
TL;DR ChatGPT claims we offer an API to turn a mobile phone number
into the location of the phone. We do not.

Our story begins. "Hey, ChatGPT is cool"

Like everyone else when ChatGPT launched a few months ago we dove in
and played with. It is impressive.

In January, as the new AI queston and answer service became more and
more popular, we noticed something interesting. Some new OpenCage
users were starting to answer "ChatGPT" when we asked them how they
had heard of us during the sign-up flow for our geocoding API.
Fantastic, we thought. Over the last eight weeks this initial trickle
of new sign-ups has become a steady flow.

But then something weird happened.

"Actually, no, this is not cool"

Many of these new users seemed to use the free trial of our geocoding
API for just a handful of API requests and then stopped completely.
Very different from the behaviour of other free trial signups.

We reached out to some of these users and asked why they had stopped.
A few answered with some varient of "it didn't work", which of course
alarmed us.

"Not cool at all"

As we dug into this it became clear most of of these new ChatGPT
users were tying to use our geocoding API for an entirely different
purpose. It seems ChatGPT is wrongly recommending us for "reverse
phone number lookup" - ie the ability to determine the location of a
mobile phone solely based on the number. This is not a service we
provide. It is not a service we have ever provided, nor a service we
have any plans to provide. Indeed, it is a not a service we are
technically capable of providing.

And yet ChatGPT has absolutely no problem recommending us for this
service (complete with python code you can cut and paste) as you can
see in this screenshot.

"Screenshot of ChatGPT wrongly suggesting OpenCage offers reverse
phone number lookup"

Looking at ChatGPT's well formulated answer, it's understandable
people believe this will work.

"This is really lame, actually"

The situation is hugely frustrating for everyone. For us, and for the
users who sign up believing we can offer this service. We're now
getting support requests every single day asking us "Why is it not
working?".

Why does ChatGPT "think" this?

You may be wondering "Why would ChatGPT 'think' they offer this
service?" No doubt it's due to the faulty YouTube tutorials people
have made where they seem to claim we can do this, as we covered
previously. ChatGPT has picked up that content.

The key difference is that humans have learned to be sceptical when
getting advice from other humans, for example via a video coding
tutorial. It seems though that we haven't yet fully internalized this
when it comes to AI in general or ChatGPT specifically. The other key
difference is the sheer scale of the problem. Bad tutorial videos got
us a handful of frustrated sign-ups. With ChatGPT the problem is
several orders of magnitude bigger.

What now?

Unfortunately it's not really clear how to solve this. All
suggestions are welcome. ChatGPT is doing exactly what it's makers
intended - producing a coherent, believable answer. Whether that
answer is truthful does not seem to matter in the slightest.

I wrote this post to have a place to send our new ChatGPT users when
they ask why it isn't work, but hopefully also it serves as a warning
to others - you absolutely can not trust the output of ChatGPT to be
truthful,

Happy geocoding (NOT "phone lookup"),

Ed

Note: this post was written by a human, not an AI.

We make the OpenCage Geocoding API - an API to convert coordinates to
and from places.

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affordable, worldwide geocoding API.

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