I threw the following prompt at my browser’s Gen-AI:

achieve greatness quote

I was expecting it to tell me that the famous quotation can be found in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night. (I honestly couldn’t remember the specific play it appears in - which is why I asked.)

And it sort-of did tell me, delighting me with this:

This quote, often attributed to William Shakespeare (though found in multiple Shakespeare plays, most commonly “Twelfth Night”), emphasizes…

Talk about hedging your bets. At least it got the quote right.

That’s what can happen, I expect, when you have models ingesting lots of crap. It’s on a par with George’s fake latex salesman interview at Vandelay Industries.

And you want Gen-AI to be my code-gen tool? I don’t think so.

Coda: A few minutes later, the same prompt gave me a much saner answer. Nobody knows why.